It's not a trojan horse, it's spelled out in the decision, debates, and legal texts to be the explicit goal. The age verification requirement was picked both as a means to prove the technology is sound and as a simple starting point for a full digital ID solution.
The EU already has some form of digital ID in fact, every government provides some kind of OIDC-like service tied to either smart cards or accounts that authenticate the user against a government. The digital wallet solution is an extension to that system that will allow foreign EU citizens to authenticate themselves more easily (eIDAS 2 already implemented an OIDC-like solution but implementation isn't automatic) as well as offer to store the (often mandatory to carry) ID on your phone.
The "what if you buy alcohol for your kids" sscenario of somone giving someone else their age verification tokens is tired and nonsensical. You can already do that in the real world. We accept that risk and, depending on the country, make it a crime in case they do catch you. It hasn't made liquor stores send someone along to see you drink your booze or watch you enjoy your porn mag.
The difference you barely have to show you physical ID - mostly only when interacting with bank, signing document, government. I never got asked when buying alcohol and if asked at least I would only let to have a look instead of snapping a picture.
Imagine if suddenly every grocery, pharmacy, petrol station, parking place, restaurant, bar etc. now would ask you for your ID AND would snap a picture and store in their database - you wouldn't be happy about it.
Why would they? The only reasons to show ID I can think of is when watching porn or maybe when buying alcohol online, though I doubt stores will want to risk driving customers away with that.
they don't know necessary who are you and what are you buying. I don't think also for big shops with many customers that techonology and reliably do instance segmentation - this is not face id.
They don't, but there is a significant chance that their "security solution" uploads all the data to a cloud provider (Amazon, Google, Oracle) which will be more than happy to analyze the data for them.
That's possible but would be completely and highly illegal, the EU regularly fines companies violating GDPR, and those fines are not trivial at all, they can be quite hefty.
I was talking about the reality of the US, but even if I was talking about Europe: how does the GDPR even enter this equation here? I was never asked for consent to have my face recorded when I get into a shop in Germany. Were you?
Its not. Especially when using US Cloud services. And people do that. Hell even government run schools us GDRP-violating software and force the students to BUY them. The law is nice, the reality is different...
This argument stays on the sand of inadequate analogy. The way that flaw is described in the story it allows industrialization of bypassing the feature. It's huge difference with the "real world".
The article is actually one of the better ones I've read. The technical analysis is somewhat above my head, but appears reasonable, and it is suggesting solutions in some cases rather than just dismissing the concerns of parents, and going full privacy nut about our democratically elected governments.
All i would say is that the solution doesn't need to be 100% effective. The same as real world "age gates" or ID verification (which is just some random person looking at your ID in most cases) are not.
The precedent set -- that everything online should NOT be immediately accessible to children -- provides parents (the ones that care at least) with some backup when trying to raise their children. Ultimately society as a whole is responsible children, and i don't want to live in a society that thinks it is fine for kids to scroll any content on social media and watch porn as soon as they are able to work out how to use a smartphone.
The replay attack mentioned may always be a loophole, I'm not sure. But any site hosting the replay attacks should be targeted for shutdown/blocking. The "source" ID must come from somewhere as well, so that could be a route to shutting them down (there are 100's of age verification requests against one ID each day, that's a bit weird...).
If parents are helping their kids bypass age gates or straight up don't care their 11 year old is watching porn, then there is not much to be done in that case. The key thing should be keeping the majority of children in compliance to give cover to the parents that do care. Not giving all the power to bad parents and social media companies as is the situation the moment.
And unlike in the real world, there's little to no real benefit to it online.
What value is there to industrializing any of this? Kids who will pay someone for their age tokens to watch porn or create social media would probably be smart enough to download a free VPN instead.
Even in the very worst case scenario for the designers of this system, where large amounts of people manage to extract their tokens and hand them out for free, the downsides everyone fears won't apply anymore. I think a lot of people might be happy about that.
This "they'll just use a vpn" argument is infuriating to me because it's being used to downplay intrusive laws and make them more palatable. The obvious next step (the UK already hinted at it after the online safety act) is forcing VPNs to do ID verification.
Age verification has taken about three or four years to reach the concept stage, and that's the first stage that will be rolled out.
The legal framework behind all this was released all the way back in 2014 and has been officially adopted ten years later.
Officially, by December 2026, each member state must have at least one official wallet solution available for its citizens.
That said, eIDAS 2.0 also mandated that, as of this year, whatever Slovak digital identity solution has been rolled out so far must also work in other member states. In my experience, different governments adopt different foreign identity services at different paces, most of them seemingly missing the deadline.
Banks and other private institutions permitted to ask for ID are supposed to accept the wallet solutions by late 2027.
I expect deadlines to be missed given we've barely gotten the age verification PoC done, but with the groundwork laid out, things might just work out.
> Real cryptographic unlinkability schemes like BBS+ or CL signatures would produce uncorrelated proofs even on reuse. This is not that.
This discussion was already led ad nauseam with the Swiss eID proposal (which is supposed to be EUID compatible) and the reason why the system relies on rotating signatures instead of ZKPs is that the cryptography hardware modules in most phones don't support algorithms such as BBS+. This creates a tradeoff where the states would have to essentially roll their own crypto storage and bank on this being safer than simply rotating through batches of signatures generated by the hardware cryptography modules (which is largely unproblematic in the grand scheme of things). The major advantage of using the hardware module is that it makes it much harder for attackers to extract the actual secret should the device ever fall into someone else's hands, something that happens to phones from time to time.
Overall, as with every digital ID thread, it would help if some of the fearmon gering commentators would read the actually EUDI specs for once in their lives as it already addresses most of the concerns copy-pasted into these threads
https://eudi.dev/1.6.0/architecture-and-reference-framework-....
Have you read the spec? I have, but I don't understand how the revocation flow is supposed to be safe against collusion between issuers/governments and site owners to reveal the identity of (age verified) users.
Can you model the flow of the attack you want to mount here?
Is it the following:
Issuer revokes the wallet of Alice and then publicly says “This ID is Alice btw” and then verifiers can check their lists to see whether any of their received signatures are revoked (in which case they must be Alice)
> Overall, as with every digital ID thread, it would help if some of the fearmon gering commentators would read the actually EUDI specs for once in their lives
Yeah
I'm getting really really tired of the "crying wolf" crowd
To be fair to some of them, across the Atlantic the Americans are implementing similar laws in absolutely ridiculous ways.
Many Americans don't even have ID (and plenty of those are reluctant to the general concept of any kind of government ID), let alone any kind of digital ID. However, their governments are pushing frankly weird and absurd ID verification laws to businesses online. Meta seems to be bankrolling lobbying around these laws, so whatever their game is, it's probably very bad for normal people.
If you're coming from a place where the government tells companies they need to set up a system or hire private companies to verify users' ages without providing any kind of official mechanism themselves, leading to ridiculous hacks from cheap and incompetent "age verification" companies, I can understand why the European system seems absurd.
If the US is going to adopt their weird age verification laws, the least they could do is fork the European system already laid out for them. Put a little American flag on it, call it "America First Christian Age Truthness" or whatever the people in charge like, but at least keep the basic privacy properties intact.
Just because the government is not out to get you at this exact moment doesn't mean that a future government won't be. Surveillance capacity seems to be a one way ratchet.
Mandatory app installation through the mandatory state sanctioned rootkit Google Play store and 4G/5G LTE modems on-chip management engines. And that doesn't even cover the ubiquitous app data partnerships which report your information upstream.
Digital ids are inevitable in my view, just as digital currency has become inescapable because it is more convenient and efficient, these ids will
be issued and things like paper proofs of identity will fall away over time. Physical tokens like bank cards and driving licenses are neither necessary nor a good solution in a networked world.
Our focus therefore should be controlling what governments can do with them - for example disallowing blocking/removing someone’s id, just as we should disallow removing citizenship.
I can't help but think people mean something else when they hear "digital ids" then what they are. Like I have a digital id from the government of the Netherlands that I use to log into their government systems to declare taxes or what not. I had an X509 certificate issued by Ukrainian government and have their app to do the same.
The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.
> And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.
Not really. Government is not Big Tech. This happens with accounts of some tech companies precisely because they're private entities setting their own rules in the still wild "wild west" of the Internet. Governments set laws and processes to ensure the things you mentioned do not happen, except in very specific circumstances.
Think of it this way: being "locked out of life completely", resulting in "no banking, no traveling, no communication", etc. is not a new problem. In the off-line world we call that being sanctioned, imprisoned, deprived of personal freedoms, etc. Yes, it happens to some people, but usually for very specific reasons (called "crimes"), after a lengthy bureaucratic process (called "trial" and "sentencing"), with plenty of safeguards to catch and rectify mistakes during and after the fact (like "legal defenses", "appeals", or even "journalists"). It is not something you normally worry about.
Humanity has worked out best practices for these thing over thousands of years of various tribes and nations and governments forming, disbanding, collapsing, emerging, conquering or becoming conquered. Adding electronic IDs on top does not change the nature of the thing. So you won't get locked out of life for posting the wrong emoji in a tax report comment; that would be like being thrown to prison for drawing something on a government form - or rather, if that's even remotely possible in your country, you have much bigger problems than digital IDs, and your best move would be to emigrate somewhere sane before borders close or civil war starts.
Plenty of other things to worry about here (e.g. ID checks suddenly being required by every business, just because it's zero effort to them for some marginal KYC benefit), but getting banned from life due to ToS violation is not one of them.
How will the current approach result in total surveillance?
I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing.
Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?
> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?
Some government (will) make mandatory:
social accounts (so also IM apps like IG, WA, X, messanger), banks, buying simcard, internet, buying alcohol, cigarettes,
energy drinks).
Some companies will make it mandatory implicitly or explicitly just for profit: selling your consumption data, analytics for themselves. E.g. in poland it's harder and harder to pay with cash because reduced stuff and huge queues - they force your use self checking. The pricing changed also that you have to use their loyalty apps if you don't want to be ripped - otherwise you will be paying 50% more.
> I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing.
I don't like it either the problem is right now you mostly this being abused only in some hotels. Whats misleading that that this digital id won't allow tracking because you supposed to "trasmitting the bare minimum of identifiable information"
Are you kidding right now? Have you seen what's happening with ICE in the US? EU countries are just one effective social media campaign cycle away from the same policies. "It can't happen here" is foolish thinking.
In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.
> just as we should disallow removing citizenship.
However lots of countries do allow removing citizenship In the UK it is a political decision too. Lots of countries allow locking people out of other things (e.g. freezing bank accounts). I therefore doubt we an effectively prevent this.
I do not see the problem with physical tokens. They are simple, do not create a single point of failure (if I lose my phone I still have my cards and cash), robust to network and systems failures. What is the drawback? Having to carry a few cards?
Yes and I find this deeply wrong - what politician would you trust with this decision? Debanking is also wrong in my view.
I think we should focus on laws against things like that which lead to tyranny rather than attempting to stop progress.
Cash in particular is expensive to produce/process and no longer honours the promise printed on it, it will be phased out as the transactions with it approach 0%.
Cards are really no different than a token in a phone and don’t work for long either in the absence of a network (both will work offline but do need to be reconciled). I haven’t habitually carried a card in about a decade, I think for similar reasons to cash they will die off by general consensus.
The drawback of physical tokens is that you can't use them online. I don't want to spend an hour waiting in queue at the city hall for something I can do online in 10 minutes.
The ideal state is having both physical and digital ID. But that will lead to a slow erosion of the willingness to carry physical ID, even if it stays available (which I believe it will for many decades. Even if national ID cards and drivers licenses were to go digital only, passports won't)
I use credit cards online all the time. I have logins for government services so I do not need to queue (I had to verify my ID using an app once for one of them). Getting a new driving license (for a change of address) was done online.
I think even digital IDs will tend to exist as physical tokens? Also worth noting that you can have a digitized and cryptographically signed ID on "paper" which can serve much the same purpose (security, machine readability) as an electronic one. Where electronic tokens shine (for IDs or otherwise) is attesting to the physical possession of a single copy.
I don’t see why they would bother with physical tokens nor would they be popular - things like passports are really quite expensive to manage and largely unecessary these days. An app or identity on people’s phone might be a good stopgap.
However I suspect biometric methods of id verification will render carrying anything redundant long term.
The databases for digital id already exist, they’re just not fully utilised yet and these databases will always be centralised.
I doubt everyone will still be carrying phones as we know them in a decade, so we might indeed be headed for a future where governments keep giant databases of biometric information. Works OK if you trust your government to handle that properly and not abuse it in the future. The real headache is crossing borders, where your details end up in the hands of a foreign state.
For one thing, it increases resilience in the event of outages. It is a tangible aspect - just like citizens are encouraged to keep cash at home at least in my country (Sweden)
I don’t see why they would bother with physical tokens nor would they be popular - things like passports are really quite expensive to manage and largely unecessary these days.
OK. I'll bite. Why are they unnecessary?
Passports have two things. They have information on them, which can be read by looking at them. And they have information on them in chip form, which can be scanned, and is also cryptographically signed by the issuing authority (eg, a government).
To verify a passport you can look at it visually, but you can also scan and validate the info, including photo, in digital form. All you need is the CSCA, the 'country signing certificate' to do so, and there aren't may of those. Small readers exist which are updated with these certs, and so even in the middle of a war zone, with RF jamming, you can verify a country signed what you're looking at.
Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail. You'd don't need a networked reachable database to validate that your ID is valid, in a digital way, which can be really helpful with 1M refugees show up at your door during a war, or when the capital city of the issuing nation has been bombed.
You may think this unimportant, but the edge cases are what 99.999% uptime is all about. And the edge cases with ID really need 100% uptime. The last thing you need during a natural disaster is an inability to ... well, do anything.
So even if you have biometric methods to identify someone, you'll also want a local, on person method which has those on chip, and signed by a government saying who you are.
Having ID network connected is also a massive, huge, immense fail. There should be no network connected databases of anything about anyone, in any form. Why? It'll be hacked. This will never, ever, ever change. Never. Paper records can't be hacked en masse, and you can get the same protections by storing records on individual chips with other associated info in paper form.
Dismantling this infrastructure and replacing it with buggy, hackable, online databases just to get digital ID verification is a complete move in the wrong direction. Verifying digitally signed information is not.
And passports can be scanned by phones.
Which means that the info, cryptographically signed, can be verified by anyone in the world too.
Really, what we need is to have everyone chipped, like a pet. Because that's where this ends up, and that's also the only way to always have your ID with you.
As a snarky aside, I've spent my entire life interacting with society all the time, yet only in the last decade has it been necessary to be "carded" constantly to do so. We've literally taken a privacy conscious society, and turned it into a nightmare. I'm identified when I go buy a loaf of bread, the most dystopian, totalitarian government anyone could ever conceive of, is a joke compared to the amount of control and tracking now exercised over people's lives.
So I guess my point is...
If it's annoying and difficult to have to carry around a physical identifier of who you are? And use it regularly?
Why is the solution to make it easier to submit to slavery?
Think that's an over the top statement?
We all know how the US government has pivoted on many things during the current administration. We also know it has had, and continues to have (via private enterprise) a robust degree of information about every fiscal transaction made.
If you look at the McCarthy hearings, they literally went so far as to find documents from decades prior, paper records of course, of people joining socialist clubs in university. Eg, simply sign-in sheets, or their names listed in the minutes of such orgs.
Decades later, that information was used to blacklist careers, destroy lives, not for any proof of malfeasance by those accused, but simply because they were curious in college about socialism.
Those same accused were then used to "name names".
My point is, from the financial data currently being stored about people, anything that makes you stand out in any way could be turned into a problem 10 years down the road. Not to mention, how credit card usage, and digital tracking, and location tracking might hit some pattern.
No one who lived through the McCarthy hearings, just watching them, or lived through how Germany or Russia controlled the lives of their citizens, would ever think any of this increased fingerprint of people is a good idea.
It's all just very dumb. And it will not end well at all.
If CBP's systems go down, they will not process (foreign, they'll process US citizens still) arrivals [1], even with physical passports in front of them. I assume the EU ESS works the same.
"If the internet goes down, your border checkpoint is down" is not some terrifying future we need to protect against, it's the reality of the world as you live in right now.
[1]: I've had to wait for an hour, at SFO of all places, because of exactly that happening.
TBF given that a temporary outage is abnormal it makes a certain amount of sense to default to shutting down. Whereas during an extended outage you can pick back up as long as the key parts of your system are capable of operating without the network.
> Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail.
Why would you need internet? Document holder smartphone can cache the document for years and present it over NFC (including photo, signature, etc). Just like existing biometric passports work, but replace the physical passport with smartphone app.
System checking it just verifies the signature is valid and thus all data presented is valid? Your browser doesn't need to query any Root CAs to trust SSL certificate, https works without internet.
History of entry and visas/etc could be stored on device as well
If you want to argue for a theoretical system that is self-contained, only relies on the data that is present on either the physical (or the theoretical cryptographically signed digital) passport, you're free to do that.
But in the real world, the systems that deal with processing people's entries already cross-reference multiple other existing databases, require internet connectivity to do so, and I think you'll have hard time convincing anyone to stop doing that.
This is not the same. For instance, we can access the internet without needing that ID. But right now there are attempts to force a digital ID in order to access information on the www - this is the whole idea behind "age verification". The kids are just used as excuse here. It has never been about the kids.
I think you're jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the digital ID proposal.
Even with that: There's plenty of services dangerous to kids that we gate behind an ID check and I don't particularly see why internet is special in any way.
> for example disallowing blocking/removing someone’s id
If I lose my passport I am obliged to call the police so that they revoke it, if I lose my phone with my digital ID on it they also need to be able to revoke that ID.
Sure, I meant disabling without replacement, making someone an unperson. Obviously updates and replacements would be required as with passports.
I don’t think governments should be allowed to do that. They do it with passports and I think it’s deeply wrong but also it would be far more damaging and immediate with a digital id (which will inevitably be used for a lot of services) - similar to being refused a bank account.
I don't see it as inevitable at any stage. Why would it be necessary? Why is access to information tied to a digital id suddenly? Also, where is digital currency inscapable? I can not pay with a bank note suddenly?
> Physical tokens like bank cards and driving licenses are neither necessary nor a good solution in a networked world.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with physical tokens. You could reason that this or that has more or fewer advantages but to insinuate that digital is always better, all of the time, is simply wrong.
In some places you cannot. I was in London post-COVID and there were a bunch of tourist things, like a riverboat on the Thames, where you could only pay with a card. Went to a craft cider bar out in the countryside and again, they didn’t accept cash. Personally, I think businesses should be forced to accept all legal tender, which means cash stays as a first class payment method, but that’s not how it is in many places.
On the other hand, in Austria there are many places that are cash only, especially small restaurants in the countryside or community sporting events with coffee bars.
With the way elections changed after social media became big. Govts want to have control back, like they did before. And are increasingly curbing open internet with boogeyman CP or terrorists, new fear of mass AI CP. Ultimately we'll get 2nd hand version of great firewall and social credit system. Some "liberal democracies" already have root of such systems implemented.
I think it has more to do with digital verification for social media in a hope of killing bot accounts that are interfering in the public debate. Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies, and with LLMs it is only getting worse. Some form of digital ID to verify social media account identities is probably the only hope left of having a real public debate.
The bot problem is solvable by using a web of trust system. You don't need a digital ID for that (i.e. you don't need to tie your digital world identity to a real world identity, nor you need a central agency to manage these).
In web of trust, anyone could publicly certify who they know is a real person (i.e. validate a link from their id to another id). Then, if you received a message from someone, the system would find the path in the graph of real people you trust, to determine the trustworthiness of the source. So if the account is a bot, there would be no path from it to you in the trust graph.
The advantage is that everyone could supply their own subjective trustworthiness score, altering the graph. They could even publish it, so that other people could use trustworthiness assesment of accounts they personally trust.
The big issue with a system of web of trust is that it is too efficient, and just kills commercial advertising (and also propaganda). Because that is all about overcoming the natural web of trust that humans have.
Then the politicians should be honest about this goal. The best way to solve a problem requires understanding what the problem is. If we pretend to solve another problem, the solution for the actual will be less than ideal.
>Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies
This is propaganda, none of those supposed networks exists or were successful in anything and when the media do show some supposed accounts they don't have a lot of views. Please stop falling for this, your democracy sucks because the politicians suck and the people want change so they turn to extremist parties.
Yes, obviously, the Romanian supreme court having to overturn and annul a presidential election due to Russian social media inference is entirely made up propaganda.
Via: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24452-eu-might-enforce-goog... which specifically quotes the law that should forbid such approach (Article 6(4) DMA) - so EU initiative and engineers consciously and intentionality breaking EU law in the prototype that is supposed to be replicated later.
I don't know if it has anything to do with changes in elections directly. My government has been talking for a while making the case that social media use makes us dumber, sadder, and more scared. I believe it's true that they also see that playing out in elections, but that's not where they want to solve a problem.
Wouldn't it be strange if solving a problem didn't affect elections?
This has been noticeable since Tahrir square; I used to say that Twitter gives you a revolution whether you need it or not.
But it's becoming increasingly clear how badly compromised the whole thing is with fake opinions and enemy propaganda.
I don't like either of the options. I don't like control by the state, and I don't like control by mad billionaires. I don't like the far right cesspool of 4chan, but can't disagree with their position that they shouldn't have to care about OFCOM.
>My government has been talking for a while making the case that social media use makes us dumber, sadder, and more scared. I believe it's true that they also see that playing out in elections, but that's not where they want to solve a problem.
The governments themselves are "dumber, sadder, and more scared". They are worried because social media puts regular people talking on equal footing to official propagandas (being able to reach everybody else). That's what they fear, because they have the lowest approval ratings and legitimization in over half a century, and they're also making everything shittier and shittier to the benefit of their corporate overlords.
You couldn't be more wrong. There's no equal footing when propaganda buys you thousands of bots to parrot what you want on every related post. And there is no ability to "reach everyone" when intransparent algorithms decide what reaches who. Moreover, some kind of content is explicitly suppressed and censored.
I will agree that governments are happy to bend the knee to corporations. But corporations control social media, so why would the corporations themselves not further their agenda using the platforms they control? Be that simply letting chaos ensue (see the UK Southport riots that were sparked by a "news story" from Pakistan) or from tuning the algorithms directly.
People have control over their government, at least in democracies that are functioning to a basic level (see Hungary recently). But they have zero control over social media, in fact the only organisations that can control global billion dollar tech companies are nation state governments...
> In any case, it was always presented as a toolbox that countries should adapt into their apps – so judging the app by itself does not make much sense, it depends on how these techniques are implemented in each country’s verification app. There will be no single EU app, despite what the honchos of EU say.
Even more reason to make the "demo" app do things correctly because it's very unlikely that all member states actually implement things correctly.
> The internet is scary, parents think they can’t protect their children from many bad things happening, and someone came to provide a “solution."
A simple solution is just not providing your kids with a phone or computer.
Don't forget that many sources of porn will not obey this. Think the pirate bay will ask for age verification? If they obeyed the law they wouldn't even exist.
It's a solution for nothing, as the article points out too.
Whether there is a single app or not doesn't really matter - i'm more concerned about the database itself and the inter-connectivity between them and most importantly by which control acceptance protocol we abide between states.
The idea that we want a single database or a network without any kind of control is frightening me
Governments need to identify citizens. They currently do this via paper records and extensive digital databases that those tie into. They will in future do this via digital records/tokens but this won’t change much.
Some amount of id verification and surveillance is of course required for a government to function, the question should be more what is allowed and what is not.
Is all data about you "surveillance". When your doctor produces a medical record after your visit, are they "surveilling" you? How about when the railway company stores your travels to bill you later?
I'll assume your answer is no, and I that case surely you must see the value in that medical record being correct.
Are you equaling mass surveillance to a doctor keeping track of your health for diagnostic accuracy purpose ?
Concerning the railway example, they only need to store how much I owe them, not my travels. Storing travel history on their end is already surveillance.
Data keeping purpose and consents are what make something surveillance or not.
Forcing every citizen to use ID to access the web is surveillance plain and simple.
> Are you equaling mass surveillance to a doctor keeping track of your health for diagnostic accuracy purpose ?
No, I am legitimately asking to clarify your position, hence why I assumed you wouldn't call that surveillance. The point was for us to agree that the right to correct data is a meaningful and useful right to have.
Once we've clarified that, the rest of the arguments comes down on the separation of "surveillance" from "record keeping", a separation you attribute to "Data keeping purposes and consents". That aligns with current EU law, and I largely agree with treating that as a separation point. If you have a valid purpose, either by law or by duty to your customer, you get to keep records necessary to fulfill that need. I would note that these "duty to your customer" clauses are usually pretty broad and would, I imagine, allow the railroad company to keep and process your travel record for fraud prevention purposes.
The issue we encounter is what a valid "data keeping purpose" is, and if we trust our public institutions and infrastructure to govern that question. Especially when the potential data processors is a government agency. This I'm entirely uninterested in debating that question with a rando on HN. We likely live in two very distinct regulatory frameworks and have vastly different local governments. There's no basis for us to agree here.
I would however end by noting that the two clauses of your statement
> Data keeping purpose and consents are what make something surveillance or not.
and
> Forcing every citizen to use ID to access the web is surveillance plain and simple.
Are in tension with one another. Clause 1 opens up for the idea that there exists valid "non-surveillance" record keeping, and that the distinction of such record keeping from surveillance requires determination of consent and purpose. Clause 2 then foregoes that determination and just presupposes the argument. All ID checks are definitionally surveillance irrespective of purpose and consent.
In the current legal framework, government derives it's unilateral consent from the vote. If the law passes in a democratic system then it is, by that very process, a consensual and valid purpose.
> Are in tension with one another. Clause 1 opens up for the idea that there exists valid "non-surveillance" record keeping, and that the distinction of such record keeping from surveillance requires determination of consent and purpose. Clause 2 then foregoes that determination and just presupposes the argument.
"Forcing" highlights the lack of consent, the distinction is still present.
> In the current legal framework, government derives it's unilateral consent from the vote. If the law passes in a democratic system, then it is, by that very process, a consensual and valid purpose.
Absolutely not. Being voted in a parliament doesn't mean citizens consented to it.
Simple example: compulsory military enrollment vs voluntary military enrollment. Only one of them derive from consent, even if both derive from a law discussed in parliament.
Since you are bringing a semantic argument you might like to know that your doctor does in fact surveil you, hence the term "public health surveillance"
I mean that there is a big difference between a state automatically providing your data to any other state while having "their database disconnected" - and a human operator in the loop and an administrative verification of the appropriate access ;
For example this would allow a state to refuse access to the PI of their citizens for cases that are not administratively documented. This forces the access audit sufficiently that a malign actor cannot simply request data for a citizen without having probable cause ; another vector we want to protect ourselves against is simply the psycho/sociopaths that have access to these data without surveillance.
It's frustrating to see how shortsighted and tech-illiterate politicians are on these topics. This article from Norway today presents the attitude of the minister of digitization as simply "Social media companies are making billions and we expect them to adequately implement age verification systems with solutions that respect privacy and we will fine those who fail at doing this".
The fantastic irony is that in some weak attempt to protect against the "evil big tech companies" they directly facilitate increased mass surveillance and removal of individual rights, instead of choosing more scalable and robust answers such as funding and promoting the development of protocols and open standards that can be applied voluntarily and in a decentralized manner to help mitigate these problems.
I have computers side by side on my desktop running Linux, and it is amazing to me how I can call `wormhole send --message hello` and receive it on the machine next to me, knowing that only I can receive this message, without it running through an age approval mechanism, without it being client-side scanned, and without being logged in some government database.
This is the century of AI and robotics - technologies which can facilitate great concentration of power and wealth. Gradually introducing mechanisms that facilitate digital fascism seems like a really bad way to guard us against this.
There are slight contradictions in this open list of complaints with a bit of guesstimates.
As mentioned digital ids are a thing and this is where everything is moving. The author mentions that it would be great to use it but does not believe it is possible and then says age checks will lead to it and it is bad. There are reasons why digital ids will be forced and one of the big ones is because bigtech companies do not want to invest into looking after the content, e.g. misinformation, bullying, etc. Not to mention the inability of companies to control the age of users, and everyone knows this is not in the interest of advertisers.
Criticism is good but it also has to offer some options. Saying everything is bad bad does not help. All in all I have kids and it is very difficult to filter all of their internet traffic and I am not your average parent. Kids are reading crap and get brainwashed everyday, and the idea that you should just let them is ridiculous. Cyber bullying is a thing and I wonder what would you do when your kids get to be on the receiving side.
IMO this is trying to blame politicians who represent their electorate who wants this without acknowledging that the issue is in huge ad funded companies whose interest is to gather all that private data without any supervision or filtering. BTW Data is constantly being leaked from large companies as well, not only gov entities.
In relation to guesstimates the author jumps to possible conclusions without sufficient proof.
What would the author suggest to fix the main issues though?
We’ve had eID for a long time and I’m fine with it becoming more prominent online. Same for age verification, once we settle on a way to do it without US/Palantir being involved in the process.
It seems unlikely that a true Zero Knowledge Proof system for things like age verification would ever be allowed.
Also, remote attestation doesn't work that way and for good reason. Under a true ZKP system, a single defector (extracted/leaked/etc key) would be able to generate an infinite number of false attestations without detection.
> It seems unlikely that a true Zero Knowledge Proof system for things like age verification would ever be allowed
This article is about EU age verification which is specifically and definitely stated as using zero knowledge proof in all technical docs that I've seen:
Not a fan, but unfortunately a "digital proof of citizenship" seems to inevitable due to the en-shitification of the internet, autocratic state actor's doctrines to destabilise free societies through disinformation that matches well with social media's en-rage-ment business model, and the more recent AI slopification / AI bots running wild.
The question is whether citizens can build enough pressure for such verification systems to be state-based and truly zero-knowledge (akin to the EU's) versus having the private sector 'verify' each user to siphon data, profit off it (Thiel's Persona) and fortify surveillance-capitalism and autocratic administrations.
At the moment in the UK (where any mention of digital ID sends half the population mental) you have to email a whole raft of ID docs and personal data to estate agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors etc. to get an ID check done. Or use a private ID service that can have a cost associated and may not be any more secure than my passport scan sitting in someones M365 mailbox. You can't know.
I'd be happy to have a government service replace all that nonsense, where a one-time challenge code could verify my ID. There is now a UK.gov "One Login" authentication used by other government services that is essentially a digital ID as far as I can see. It just needs to be made mandatory for ID checks by law.
Such a service can also be used for age verification with the correct privacy controls in place, far better than all the dodgy age verification services that exist now.
Digital ID and age verification are going to be a part of the internet going forward. I'd rather have a government service that (in a functioning democracy) has accountability to the citizens that use it. ID verification is also a natural monopoly, so the government picks a winner anyway.
Digital IDs are fine (and desired even) if you are only requiring it for GOVERNMENT (same entity that released them) communication. Push for age control is scheme to make that info available for private companies and that's the trojan horse here.
A digital ID not based on EU hardware should be taken down with prejudice. It's a direct threat to national security. US companies and, by extension, US government authorities have control over every popular endpoint (mobile phones, desktop OS).
Besides, if someone wants a digital ID, it already exists in many countries. Phones with NFC chips can read many passports, e.g. Germany has an "electronic passport" since 2005. It's barely used, though, because it's bullshit.
Interesting point about ZKP systems. The challenge
with age verification is balancing privacy with
enforcement — any centralized solution creates a
honeypot for data breaches.
How's this going to work now that there are, arguably, already more AI agents online than humans? Or close to it. Most of the web if fake AI slop already. Many websites are more crawled by bots than by real people.
We'll need to apply for digital IDs for bots and AI agents?
> There will be no single EU app, despite what the honchos of EU say.
This shows that the EU commission is systematically lying.
This problem used to exist in the past with Leyen - she is ultimately a lobbyist and that has to stop. Friedrich Merz too by the way - there is a reason why recent polls indicate that the german voters want him out of politics at once.
The EU needs to reform. Right now lobbyists have too much abuse-power. The age sniffing is a great example here - isn't it suspicious how this goes in sync right now in so many countries? Who is paying for this? Nobody needs that, except for some companies.
> Big platforms must verify age for certain content.
But why is their concern, suddenly my concern? I see no need to be in support of any law that would require people to ID in order to access information on the world wide web. That's very obviously the real goal and agenda - everyone with a bit of brains sees this.
> It is the same EU that hates these American corporations and wants EU alternatives for everything
That's not true. The EU commission I consider a lobbyist group, for instance. They lie and lie and lie.
Nothing will seriously changed. The current way how the EU is structure is totally wrong; and it will not be fixed because those in the system, benefit from it financially. See the recent attempt to force EU taxpayers to pay more for those goons. They constantly try to inflate their own budget, at our cost.
> yet no one can make a phone usable for age verification without the blessing of Google
Indeed. We have total incompetence at the leadership level. It should be replaced with technical prowess, but as long as lobbyists such as Leyen are running the show, nothing will change. See the corruption scandals when she was still in Germany. Interestingly the AfD is also full of that, yet voters don't see it - Weidel was working for many years for Goldman sucks. So a next generation of lobbyists will replace the older generation soon. That's why this system how it is, is unfixable. It is broken by design.
When did any EU representative ever lie about this? It has been very clear from the beginning that every member state would make their own apps.
I don't really see what internal German politics and lobbying has to do with anything.
As for the "Google" part, that's up to the member states to decide. In essence, the law states that apps should be secure and untampered. It doesn't specify any remote attestation partner, nor even the strict need for remote attestation although it's hard to accomplish any kind of phone-based authentication security without it. Android's native attestation solution also exists and works for phones sold without Google services, though it's an absolute pain to work with.
Sailfish, pmOS, or any other mobile OS could implement the security requirements if they ever get enough serious popularity to convince governments to make apps for them.
It's not a trojan horse, it's spelled out in the decision, debates, and legal texts to be the explicit goal. The age verification requirement was picked both as a means to prove the technology is sound and as a simple starting point for a full digital ID solution.
The EU already has some form of digital ID in fact, every government provides some kind of OIDC-like service tied to either smart cards or accounts that authenticate the user against a government. The digital wallet solution is an extension to that system that will allow foreign EU citizens to authenticate themselves more easily (eIDAS 2 already implemented an OIDC-like solution but implementation isn't automatic) as well as offer to store the (often mandatory to carry) ID on your phone.
The "what if you buy alcohol for your kids" sscenario of somone giving someone else their age verification tokens is tired and nonsensical. You can already do that in the real world. We accept that risk and, depending on the country, make it a crime in case they do catch you. It hasn't made liquor stores send someone along to see you drink your booze or watch you enjoy your porn mag.
The difference you barely have to show you physical ID - mostly only when interacting with bank, signing document, government. I never got asked when buying alcohol and if asked at least I would only let to have a look instead of snapping a picture.
Imagine if suddenly every grocery, pharmacy, petrol station, parking place, restaurant, bar etc. now would ask you for your ID AND would snap a picture and store in their database - you wouldn't be happy about it.
If you want an example of how this will be abused by companies, https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/12/airport-shops-...
Why would they? The only reasons to show ID I can think of is when watching porn or maybe when buying alcohol online, though I doubt stores will want to risk driving customers away with that.
Or using social media, signing up for any account where you can post content, and soon creating an account on your own device.
As for why would they, the same reason there are hundreds of tracking cookies on every site.
Consider that stores create reward point systems specifically for the purpose of connecting a customer profile to purchases.
Yeah, imagine if every convenience store had CCTV security filming everyone 24/7.
Oh, wait...
they don't know necessary who are you and what are you buying. I don't think also for big shops with many customers that techonology and reliably do instance segmentation - this is not face id.
They don't, but there is a significant chance that their "security solution" uploads all the data to a cloud provider (Amazon, Google, Oracle) which will be more than happy to analyze the data for them.
That's possible but would be completely and highly illegal, the EU regularly fines companies violating GDPR, and those fines are not trivial at all, they can be quite hefty.
I was talking about the reality of the US, but even if I was talking about Europe: how does the GDPR even enter this equation here? I was never asked for consent to have my face recorded when I get into a shop in Germany. Were you?
Security recordings fall into the category if legitimate need, and have to be deleted after a short while.
How is that enforced?
Its not. Especially when using US Cloud services. And people do that. Hell even government run schools us GDRP-violating software and force the students to BUY them. The law is nice, the reality is different...
Doesn't stop the stores from posting clips of you embarrassing yourself online and your acquaintances giving your name away for clout.
>You can already do that in the real world.
This argument stays on the sand of inadequate analogy. The way that flaw is described in the story it allows industrialization of bypassing the feature. It's huge difference with the "real world".
The article is actually one of the better ones I've read. The technical analysis is somewhat above my head, but appears reasonable, and it is suggesting solutions in some cases rather than just dismissing the concerns of parents, and going full privacy nut about our democratically elected governments.
All i would say is that the solution doesn't need to be 100% effective. The same as real world "age gates" or ID verification (which is just some random person looking at your ID in most cases) are not.
The precedent set -- that everything online should NOT be immediately accessible to children -- provides parents (the ones that care at least) with some backup when trying to raise their children. Ultimately society as a whole is responsible children, and i don't want to live in a society that thinks it is fine for kids to scroll any content on social media and watch porn as soon as they are able to work out how to use a smartphone.
The replay attack mentioned may always be a loophole, I'm not sure. But any site hosting the replay attacks should be targeted for shutdown/blocking. The "source" ID must come from somewhere as well, so that could be a route to shutting them down (there are 100's of age verification requests against one ID each day, that's a bit weird...).
If parents are helping their kids bypass age gates or straight up don't care their 11 year old is watching porn, then there is not much to be done in that case. The key thing should be keeping the majority of children in compliance to give cover to the parents that do care. Not giving all the power to bad parents and social media companies as is the situation the moment.
And unlike in the real world, there's little to no real benefit to it online.
What value is there to industrializing any of this? Kids who will pay someone for their age tokens to watch porn or create social media would probably be smart enough to download a free VPN instead.
Even in the very worst case scenario for the designers of this system, where large amounts of people manage to extract their tokens and hand them out for free, the downsides everyone fears won't apply anymore. I think a lot of people might be happy about that.
This "they'll just use a vpn" argument is infuriating to me because it's being used to downplay intrusive laws and make them more palatable. The obvious next step (the UK already hinted at it after the online safety act) is forcing VPNs to do ID verification.
> The digital wallet solution is an extension to that system that will allow foreign EU citizens to authenticate themselves more easily
Is there a roadmap and/or a timeframe for that? I have a Slovak ID same as the author, when will it be useful for accessing internet services?
Age verification has taken about three or four years to reach the concept stage, and that's the first stage that will be rolled out.
The legal framework behind all this was released all the way back in 2014 and has been officially adopted ten years later.
Officially, by December 2026, each member state must have at least one official wallet solution available for its citizens.
That said, eIDAS 2.0 also mandated that, as of this year, whatever Slovak digital identity solution has been rolled out so far must also work in other member states. In my experience, different governments adopt different foreign identity services at different paces, most of them seemingly missing the deadline.
Banks and other private institutions permitted to ask for ID are supposed to accept the wallet solutions by late 2027.
I expect deadlines to be missed given we've barely gotten the age verification PoC done, but with the groundwork laid out, things might just work out.
> Real cryptographic unlinkability schemes like BBS+ or CL signatures would produce uncorrelated proofs even on reuse. This is not that.
This discussion was already led ad nauseam with the Swiss eID proposal (which is supposed to be EUID compatible) and the reason why the system relies on rotating signatures instead of ZKPs is that the cryptography hardware modules in most phones don't support algorithms such as BBS+. This creates a tradeoff where the states would have to essentially roll their own crypto storage and bank on this being safer than simply rotating through batches of signatures generated by the hardware cryptography modules (which is largely unproblematic in the grand scheme of things). The major advantage of using the hardware module is that it makes it much harder for attackers to extract the actual secret should the device ever fall into someone else's hands, something that happens to phones from time to time.
Overall, as with every digital ID thread, it would help if some of the fearmon gering commentators would read the actually EUDI specs for once in their lives as it already addresses most of the concerns copy-pasted into these threads https://eudi.dev/1.6.0/architecture-and-reference-framework-....
Have you read the spec? I have, but I don't understand how the revocation flow is supposed to be safe against collusion between issuers/governments and site owners to reveal the identity of (age verified) users.
Can you model the flow of the attack you want to mount here?
Is it the following:
Issuer revokes the wallet of Alice and then publicly says “This ID is Alice btw” and then verifiers can check their lists to see whether any of their received signatures are revoked (in which case they must be Alice)
> Overall, as with every digital ID thread, it would help if some of the fearmon gering commentators would read the actually EUDI specs for once in their lives
Yeah
I'm getting really really tired of the "crying wolf" crowd
To be fair to some of them, across the Atlantic the Americans are implementing similar laws in absolutely ridiculous ways.
Many Americans don't even have ID (and plenty of those are reluctant to the general concept of any kind of government ID), let alone any kind of digital ID. However, their governments are pushing frankly weird and absurd ID verification laws to businesses online. Meta seems to be bankrolling lobbying around these laws, so whatever their game is, it's probably very bad for normal people.
If you're coming from a place where the government tells companies they need to set up a system or hire private companies to verify users' ages without providing any kind of official mechanism themselves, leading to ridiculous hacks from cheap and incompetent "age verification" companies, I can understand why the European system seems absurd.
If the US is going to adopt their weird age verification laws, the least they could do is fork the European system already laid out for them. Put a little American flag on it, call it "America First Christian Age Truthness" or whatever the people in charge like, but at least keep the basic privacy properties intact.
Just because the government is not out to get you at this exact moment doesn't mean that a future government won't be. Surveillance capacity seems to be a one way ratchet.
What surveillance capacity? In what way does the spec build surveillance capacity?
Mandatory app installation through the mandatory state sanctioned rootkit Google Play store and 4G/5G LTE modems on-chip management engines. And that doesn't even cover the ubiquitous app data partnerships which report your information upstream.
Digital ids are inevitable in my view, just as digital currency has become inescapable because it is more convenient and efficient, these ids will be issued and things like paper proofs of identity will fall away over time. Physical tokens like bank cards and driving licenses are neither necessary nor a good solution in a networked world.
Our focus therefore should be controlling what governments can do with them - for example disallowing blocking/removing someone’s id, just as we should disallow removing citizenship.
I can't help but think people mean something else when they hear "digital ids" then what they are. Like I have a digital id from the government of the Netherlands that I use to log into their government systems to declare taxes or what not. I had an X509 certificate issued by Ukrainian government and have their app to do the same.
It's bad somehow?
The problem is what follows. They will make it mandatory to use the electronic ID to do anything, resulting in total surveillance. And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.
> And if you happen to land on their "bad" list (which eventually everyone will), you're locked out of life completely. No banking, no traveling, no communication with anyone, no buying food, nothing.
Not really. Government is not Big Tech. This happens with accounts of some tech companies precisely because they're private entities setting their own rules in the still wild "wild west" of the Internet. Governments set laws and processes to ensure the things you mentioned do not happen, except in very specific circumstances.
Think of it this way: being "locked out of life completely", resulting in "no banking, no traveling, no communication", etc. is not a new problem. In the off-line world we call that being sanctioned, imprisoned, deprived of personal freedoms, etc. Yes, it happens to some people, but usually for very specific reasons (called "crimes"), after a lengthy bureaucratic process (called "trial" and "sentencing"), with plenty of safeguards to catch and rectify mistakes during and after the fact (like "legal defenses", "appeals", or even "journalists"). It is not something you normally worry about.
Humanity has worked out best practices for these thing over thousands of years of various tribes and nations and governments forming, disbanding, collapsing, emerging, conquering or becoming conquered. Adding electronic IDs on top does not change the nature of the thing. So you won't get locked out of life for posting the wrong emoji in a tax report comment; that would be like being thrown to prison for drawing something on a government form - or rather, if that's even remotely possible in your country, you have much bigger problems than digital IDs, and your best move would be to emigrate somewhere sane before borders close or civil war starts.
Plenty of other things to worry about here (e.g. ID checks suddenly being required by every business, just because it's zero effort to them for some marginal KYC benefit), but getting banned from life due to ToS violation is not one of them.
"They" will make it mandatory? Who is they?
How will the current approach result in total surveillance?
I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing.
Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?
> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?
Some government (will) make mandatory: social accounts (so also IM apps like IG, WA, X, messanger), banks, buying simcard, internet, buying alcohol, cigarettes, energy drinks).
Some companies will make it mandatory implicitly or explicitly just for profit: selling your consumption data, analytics for themselves. E.g. in poland it's harder and harder to pay with cash because reduced stuff and huge queues - they force your use self checking. The pricing changed also that you have to use their loyalty apps if you don't want to be ripped - otherwise you will be paying 50% more.
> I would much prefer hotels would have a scanner which just transmits the bare minimum of identifiable information from the ID instead of it being completely normalized in many countries/hotels that they take your ID card and scan the full thing.
I don't like it either the problem is right now you mostly this being abused only in some hotels. Whats misleading that that this digital id won't allow tracking because you supposed to "trasmitting the bare minimum of identifiable information"
> Can you explain to me, how with an eID one would be prevented from communicating with anyone or buying food?
Why did you only ask about eID and not about "inescapable digital currencies" that was also mentioned in the same paragraph at the top of the thread?
Are you kidding right now? Have you seen what's happening with ICE in the US? EU countries are just one effective social media campaign cycle away from the same policies. "It can't happen here" is foolish thinking.
See also: CCP
In Latvia we've had digital id for close to 20 years. Banks mostly use their own auth, some rely on digital id. No travel service has ever wanted me to use digital id, let alone any other kind of shopping. What we use it for is access to government resources, and signing digital documents. I trust this system WAY more than whatever some company comes up with.
This is an interesting and hopeful datapoint.
> just as we should disallow removing citizenship.
However lots of countries do allow removing citizenship In the UK it is a political decision too. Lots of countries allow locking people out of other things (e.g. freezing bank accounts). I therefore doubt we an effectively prevent this.
I do not see the problem with physical tokens. They are simple, do not create a single point of failure (if I lose my phone I still have my cards and cash), robust to network and systems failures. What is the drawback? Having to carry a few cards?
Yes and I find this deeply wrong - what politician would you trust with this decision? Debanking is also wrong in my view.
I think we should focus on laws against things like that which lead to tyranny rather than attempting to stop progress.
Cash in particular is expensive to produce/process and no longer honours the promise printed on it, it will be phased out as the transactions with it approach 0%.
Cards are really no different than a token in a phone and don’t work for long either in the absence of a network (both will work offline but do need to be reconciled). I haven’t habitually carried a card in about a decade, I think for similar reasons to cash they will die off by general consensus.
The drawback of physical tokens is that you can't use them online. I don't want to spend an hour waiting in queue at the city hall for something I can do online in 10 minutes.
The ideal state is having both physical and digital ID. But that will lead to a slow erosion of the willingness to carry physical ID, even if it stays available (which I believe it will for many decades. Even if national ID cards and drivers licenses were to go digital only, passports won't)
I use credit cards online all the time. I have logins for government services so I do not need to queue (I had to verify my ID using an app once for one of them). Getting a new driving license (for a change of address) was done online.
I think even digital IDs will tend to exist as physical tokens? Also worth noting that you can have a digitized and cryptographically signed ID on "paper" which can serve much the same purpose (security, machine readability) as an electronic one. Where electronic tokens shine (for IDs or otherwise) is attesting to the physical possession of a single copy.
I don’t see why they would bother with physical tokens nor would they be popular - things like passports are really quite expensive to manage and largely unecessary these days. An app or identity on people’s phone might be a good stopgap.
However I suspect biometric methods of id verification will render carrying anything redundant long term.
The databases for digital id already exist, they’re just not fully utilised yet and these databases will always be centralised.
I doubt everyone will still be carrying phones as we know them in a decade, so we might indeed be headed for a future where governments keep giant databases of biometric information. Works OK if you trust your government to handle that properly and not abuse it in the future. The real headache is crossing borders, where your details end up in the hands of a foreign state.
> so we might indeed be headed for a future where governments keep giant databases of biometric information
Don't want to wake you from that nice dream but that ship has sailed quite a while back, at least here in the EU.
Biometrics are usernames at best not passwords.
We are already in that future and have been for at least a decade. Passports contain biometrics which are in a central db too.
What? What to replace the phones with? And why whatever replaces them wouldn't be able to do the same things?
For one thing, it increases resilience in the event of outages. It is a tangible aspect - just like citizens are encouraged to keep cash at home at least in my country (Sweden)
Does it though? Our world is now so networked that borders shut down if the network is down - see other responses on this thread.
I don’t see why they would bother with physical tokens nor would they be popular - things like passports are really quite expensive to manage and largely unecessary these days.
OK. I'll bite. Why are they unnecessary?
Passports have two things. They have information on them, which can be read by looking at them. And they have information on them in chip form, which can be scanned, and is also cryptographically signed by the issuing authority (eg, a government).
To verify a passport you can look at it visually, but you can also scan and validate the info, including photo, in digital form. All you need is the CSCA, the 'country signing certificate' to do so, and there aren't may of those. Small readers exist which are updated with these certs, and so even in the middle of a war zone, with RF jamming, you can verify a country signed what you're looking at.
Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail. You'd don't need a networked reachable database to validate that your ID is valid, in a digital way, which can be really helpful with 1M refugees show up at your door during a war, or when the capital city of the issuing nation has been bombed.
You may think this unimportant, but the edge cases are what 99.999% uptime is all about. And the edge cases with ID really need 100% uptime. The last thing you need during a natural disaster is an inability to ... well, do anything.
So even if you have biometric methods to identify someone, you'll also want a local, on person method which has those on chip, and signed by a government saying who you are.
Having ID network connected is also a massive, huge, immense fail. There should be no network connected databases of anything about anyone, in any form. Why? It'll be hacked. This will never, ever, ever change. Never. Paper records can't be hacked en masse, and you can get the same protections by storing records on individual chips with other associated info in paper form.
Dismantling this infrastructure and replacing it with buggy, hackable, online databases just to get digital ID verification is a complete move in the wrong direction. Verifying digitally signed information is not.
And passports can be scanned by phones.
Which means that the info, cryptographically signed, can be verified by anyone in the world too.
Really, what we need is to have everyone chipped, like a pet. Because that's where this ends up, and that's also the only way to always have your ID with you.
As a snarky aside, I've spent my entire life interacting with society all the time, yet only in the last decade has it been necessary to be "carded" constantly to do so. We've literally taken a privacy conscious society, and turned it into a nightmare. I'm identified when I go buy a loaf of bread, the most dystopian, totalitarian government anyone could ever conceive of, is a joke compared to the amount of control and tracking now exercised over people's lives.
So I guess my point is...
If it's annoying and difficult to have to carry around a physical identifier of who you are? And use it regularly?
Why is the solution to make it easier to submit to slavery?
Think that's an over the top statement?
We all know how the US government has pivoted on many things during the current administration. We also know it has had, and continues to have (via private enterprise) a robust degree of information about every fiscal transaction made.
If you look at the McCarthy hearings, they literally went so far as to find documents from decades prior, paper records of course, of people joining socialist clubs in university. Eg, simply sign-in sheets, or their names listed in the minutes of such orgs.
Decades later, that information was used to blacklist careers, destroy lives, not for any proof of malfeasance by those accused, but simply because they were curious in college about socialism.
Those same accused were then used to "name names".
My point is, from the financial data currently being stored about people, anything that makes you stand out in any way could be turned into a problem 10 years down the road. Not to mention, how credit card usage, and digital tracking, and location tracking might hit some pattern.
No one who lived through the McCarthy hearings, just watching them, or lived through how Germany or Russia controlled the lives of their citizens, would ever think any of this increased fingerprint of people is a good idea.
It's all just very dumb. And it will not end well at all.
This is not how the world already works.
If CBP's systems go down, they will not process (foreign, they'll process US citizens still) arrivals [1], even with physical passports in front of them. I assume the EU ESS works the same.
"If the internet goes down, your border checkpoint is down" is not some terrifying future we need to protect against, it's the reality of the world as you live in right now.
[1]: I've had to wait for an hour, at SFO of all places, because of exactly that happening.
TBF given that a temporary outage is abnormal it makes a certain amount of sense to default to shutting down. Whereas during an extended outage you can pick back up as long as the key parts of your system are capable of operating without the network.
> Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail.
Why would you need internet? Document holder smartphone can cache the document for years and present it over NFC (including photo, signature, etc). Just like existing biometric passports work, but replace the physical passport with smartphone app.
To check against $your-local-law-enforcement-agency database, $your-local-immigration-agency for history of entry, etc.
The internet requirement is not there for the person presenting the document, it's for the person/system checking it.
System checking it just verifies the signature is valid and thus all data presented is valid? Your browser doesn't need to query any Root CAs to trust SSL certificate, https works without internet.
History of entry and visas/etc could be stored on device as well
If you want to argue for a theoretical system that is self-contained, only relies on the data that is present on either the physical (or the theoretical cryptographically signed digital) passport, you're free to do that.
But in the real world, the systems that deal with processing people's entries already cross-reference multiple other existing databases, require internet connectivity to do so, and I think you'll have hard time convincing anyone to stop doing that.
Many EU countries already issue a chipcard IDs which can be used to auth for government services (via NFC or a dedicated reader).
So yeah, I'd expect those to move to a phone as an alternative to the card
This is not the same. For instance, we can access the internet without needing that ID. But right now there are attempts to force a digital ID in order to access information on the www - this is the whole idea behind "age verification". The kids are just used as excuse here. It has never been about the kids.
I think you're jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the digital ID proposal.
Even with that: There's plenty of services dangerous to kids that we gate behind an ID check and I don't particularly see why internet is special in any way.
Inevitable indeed. Rabbit hole ahead. UE has been for many years the way to prevent "controlling what governments can do with them". https://escapekey.substack.com/p/europe-goes-full-digital
> for example disallowing blocking/removing someone’s id
If I lose my passport I am obliged to call the police so that they revoke it, if I lose my phone with my digital ID on it they also need to be able to revoke that ID.
Sure, I meant disabling without replacement, making someone an unperson. Obviously updates and replacements would be required as with passports.
I don’t think governments should be allowed to do that. They do it with passports and I think it’s deeply wrong but also it would be far more damaging and immediate with a digital id (which will inevitably be used for a lot of services) - similar to being refused a bank account.
I don't see it as inevitable at any stage. Why would it be necessary? Why is access to information tied to a digital id suddenly? Also, where is digital currency inscapable? I can not pay with a bank note suddenly?
> Physical tokens like bank cards and driving licenses are neither necessary nor a good solution in a networked world.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with physical tokens. You could reason that this or that has more or fewer advantages but to insinuate that digital is always better, all of the time, is simply wrong.
> I can not pay with a bank note suddenly?
In some places you cannot. I was in London post-COVID and there were a bunch of tourist things, like a riverboat on the Thames, where you could only pay with a card. Went to a craft cider bar out in the countryside and again, they didn’t accept cash. Personally, I think businesses should be forced to accept all legal tender, which means cash stays as a first class payment method, but that’s not how it is in many places.
On the other hand, in Austria there are many places that are cash only, especially small restaurants in the countryside or community sporting events with coffee bars.
With the way elections changed after social media became big. Govts want to have control back, like they did before. And are increasingly curbing open internet with boogeyman CP or terrorists, new fear of mass AI CP. Ultimately we'll get 2nd hand version of great firewall and social credit system. Some "liberal democracies" already have root of such systems implemented.
I think it has more to do with digital verification for social media in a hope of killing bot accounts that are interfering in the public debate. Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies, and with LLMs it is only getting worse. Some form of digital ID to verify social media account identities is probably the only hope left of having a real public debate.
The bot problem is solvable by using a web of trust system. You don't need a digital ID for that (i.e. you don't need to tie your digital world identity to a real world identity, nor you need a central agency to manage these).
In web of trust, anyone could publicly certify who they know is a real person (i.e. validate a link from their id to another id). Then, if you received a message from someone, the system would find the path in the graph of real people you trust, to determine the trustworthiness of the source. So if the account is a bot, there would be no path from it to you in the trust graph.
The advantage is that everyone could supply their own subjective trustworthiness score, altering the graph. They could even publish it, so that other people could use trustworthiness assesment of accounts they personally trust.
The big issue with a system of web of trust is that it is too efficient, and just kills commercial advertising (and also propaganda). Because that is all about overcoming the natural web of trust that humans have.
Then the politicians should be honest about this goal. The best way to solve a problem requires understanding what the problem is. If we pretend to solve another problem, the solution for the actual will be less than ideal.
>Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies
This is propaganda, none of those supposed networks exists or were successful in anything and when the media do show some supposed accounts they don't have a lot of views. Please stop falling for this, your democracy sucks because the politicians suck and the people want change so they turn to extremist parties.
Yes, obviously, the Romanian supreme court having to overturn and annul a presidential election due to Russian social media inference is entirely made up propaganda.
Romania's courts are corrupt and not independent.
The governments don't mind AI CP even made with real children as long as you're a billionaire openly selling access to the generator.
That kind of serves as a proof to your opinion it's a boogeyman.
> Govts want to have control back
By forcing us to go through devices completely controlled by US companies?
Yes. Control of information and citizen's behaviour is a higher priority for them than sovereignty.
What are you referencing here?
Many of the proposed EU digital solutions require a Google or Apple verified phone. This makes escaping American companies difficult.
I don't think that's true, it seems to be just this specific German one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644406
I'm afraid you're wrong.
Whitelabel/demo implementation specifically pushes FOR Google Play Integrity after being explained why that's a bad idea: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...
Via: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24452-eu-might-enforce-goog... which specifically quotes the law that should forbid such approach (Article 6(4) DMA) - so EU initiative and engineers consciously and intentionality breaking EU law in the prototype that is supposed to be replicated later.
Switzerland's rely completely on an (Android/iOS) application. No desktop version. If you change your phone you must ask for a new ID.
I don't know if it has anything to do with changes in elections directly. My government has been talking for a while making the case that social media use makes us dumber, sadder, and more scared. I believe it's true that they also see that playing out in elections, but that's not where they want to solve a problem.
Wouldn't it be strange if solving a problem didn't affect elections?
This has been noticeable since Tahrir square; I used to say that Twitter gives you a revolution whether you need it or not.
But it's becoming increasingly clear how badly compromised the whole thing is with fake opinions and enemy propaganda.
I don't like either of the options. I don't like control by the state, and I don't like control by mad billionaires. I don't like the far right cesspool of 4chan, but can't disagree with their position that they shouldn't have to care about OFCOM.
>My government has been talking for a while making the case that social media use makes us dumber, sadder, and more scared. I believe it's true that they also see that playing out in elections, but that's not where they want to solve a problem.
The governments themselves are "dumber, sadder, and more scared". They are worried because social media puts regular people talking on equal footing to official propagandas (being able to reach everybody else). That's what they fear, because they have the lowest approval ratings and legitimization in over half a century, and they're also making everything shittier and shittier to the benefit of their corporate overlords.
You couldn't be more wrong. There's no equal footing when propaganda buys you thousands of bots to parrot what you want on every related post. And there is no ability to "reach everyone" when intransparent algorithms decide what reaches who. Moreover, some kind of content is explicitly suppressed and censored.
I will agree that governments are happy to bend the knee to corporations. But corporations control social media, so why would the corporations themselves not further their agenda using the platforms they control? Be that simply letting chaos ensue (see the UK Southport riots that were sparked by a "news story" from Pakistan) or from tuning the algorithms directly.
People have control over their government, at least in democracies that are functioning to a basic level (see Hungary recently). But they have zero control over social media, in fact the only organisations that can control global billion dollar tech companies are nation state governments...
It could be both
> In any case, it was always presented as a toolbox that countries should adapt into their apps – so judging the app by itself does not make much sense, it depends on how these techniques are implemented in each country’s verification app. There will be no single EU app, despite what the honchos of EU say.
Even more reason to make the "demo" app do things correctly because it's very unlikely that all member states actually implement things correctly.
> The internet is scary, parents think they can’t protect their children from many bad things happening, and someone came to provide a “solution."
A simple solution is just not providing your kids with a phone or computer.
Don't forget that many sources of porn will not obey this. Think the pirate bay will ask for age verification? If they obeyed the law they wouldn't even exist.
It's a solution for nothing, as the article points out too.
Whether there is a single app or not doesn't really matter - i'm more concerned about the database itself and the inter-connectivity between them and most importantly by which control acceptance protocol we abide between states.
The idea that we want a single database or a network without any kind of control is frightening me
What do you mean by "control" here? It's my understanding that EU law afford citizens the right to correct data that is wrong about them.
The problem is not about the data being correct or not, it's about its existence in the first place.
Why would you correct data about you very own surveillance ?
Governments need to identify citizens. They currently do this via paper records and extensive digital databases that those tie into. They will in future do this via digital records/tokens but this won’t change much.
Some amount of id verification and surveillance is of course required for a government to function, the question should be more what is allowed and what is not.
Is all data about you "surveillance". When your doctor produces a medical record after your visit, are they "surveilling" you? How about when the railway company stores your travels to bill you later?
I'll assume your answer is no, and I that case surely you must see the value in that medical record being correct.
Are you equaling mass surveillance to a doctor keeping track of your health for diagnostic accuracy purpose ?
Concerning the railway example, they only need to store how much I owe them, not my travels. Storing travel history on their end is already surveillance.
Data keeping purpose and consents are what make something surveillance or not. Forcing every citizen to use ID to access the web is surveillance plain and simple.
> Are you equaling mass surveillance to a doctor keeping track of your health for diagnostic accuracy purpose ?
No, I am legitimately asking to clarify your position, hence why I assumed you wouldn't call that surveillance. The point was for us to agree that the right to correct data is a meaningful and useful right to have.
Once we've clarified that, the rest of the arguments comes down on the separation of "surveillance" from "record keeping", a separation you attribute to "Data keeping purposes and consents". That aligns with current EU law, and I largely agree with treating that as a separation point. If you have a valid purpose, either by law or by duty to your customer, you get to keep records necessary to fulfill that need. I would note that these "duty to your customer" clauses are usually pretty broad and would, I imagine, allow the railroad company to keep and process your travel record for fraud prevention purposes.
The issue we encounter is what a valid "data keeping purpose" is, and if we trust our public institutions and infrastructure to govern that question. Especially when the potential data processors is a government agency. This I'm entirely uninterested in debating that question with a rando on HN. We likely live in two very distinct regulatory frameworks and have vastly different local governments. There's no basis for us to agree here.
I would however end by noting that the two clauses of your statement
> Data keeping purpose and consents are what make something surveillance or not.
and
> Forcing every citizen to use ID to access the web is surveillance plain and simple.
Are in tension with one another. Clause 1 opens up for the idea that there exists valid "non-surveillance" record keeping, and that the distinction of such record keeping from surveillance requires determination of consent and purpose. Clause 2 then foregoes that determination and just presupposes the argument. All ID checks are definitionally surveillance irrespective of purpose and consent.
In the current legal framework, government derives it's unilateral consent from the vote. If the law passes in a democratic system then it is, by that very process, a consensual and valid purpose.
> Are in tension with one another. Clause 1 opens up for the idea that there exists valid "non-surveillance" record keeping, and that the distinction of such record keeping from surveillance requires determination of consent and purpose. Clause 2 then foregoes that determination and just presupposes the argument.
"Forcing" highlights the lack of consent, the distinction is still present.
> In the current legal framework, government derives it's unilateral consent from the vote. If the law passes in a democratic system, then it is, by that very process, a consensual and valid purpose.
Absolutely not. Being voted in a parliament doesn't mean citizens consented to it.
Simple example: compulsory military enrollment vs voluntary military enrollment. Only one of them derive from consent, even if both derive from a law discussed in parliament.
Since you are bringing a semantic argument you might like to know that your doctor does in fact surveil you, hence the term "public health surveillance"
I have never heard the term "public health surveillance" and it's hypothetical use has no bearing on my argument.
I mean that there is a big difference between a state automatically providing your data to any other state while having "their database disconnected" - and a human operator in the loop and an administrative verification of the appropriate access ;
For example this would allow a state to refuse access to the PI of their citizens for cases that are not administratively documented. This forces the access audit sufficiently that a malign actor cannot simply request data for a citizen without having probable cause ; another vector we want to protect ourselves against is simply the psycho/sociopaths that have access to these data without surveillance.
> A simple solution is just not providing your kids with a phone or computer.
That’s not a solution. Nowadays many schools require access to a computer.
These schools, at least here where I am in Europe, have to provide their pupils with devices. How else would it be fair?
It's frustrating to see how shortsighted and tech-illiterate politicians are on these topics. This article from Norway today presents the attitude of the minister of digitization as simply "Social media companies are making billions and we expect them to adequately implement age verification systems with solutions that respect privacy and we will fine those who fail at doing this".
The fantastic irony is that in some weak attempt to protect against the "evil big tech companies" they directly facilitate increased mass surveillance and removal of individual rights, instead of choosing more scalable and robust answers such as funding and promoting the development of protocols and open standards that can be applied voluntarily and in a decentralized manner to help mitigate these problems.
I have computers side by side on my desktop running Linux, and it is amazing to me how I can call `wormhole send --message hello` and receive it on the machine next to me, knowing that only I can receive this message, without it running through an age approval mechanism, without it being client-side scanned, and without being logged in some government database.
This is the century of AI and robotics - technologies which can facilitate great concentration of power and wealth. Gradually introducing mechanisms that facilitate digital fascism seems like a really bad way to guard us against this.
https://www.nrk.no/norge/datatilsynet-bekymret-for-personver...
There are slight contradictions in this open list of complaints with a bit of guesstimates.
As mentioned digital ids are a thing and this is where everything is moving. The author mentions that it would be great to use it but does not believe it is possible and then says age checks will lead to it and it is bad. There are reasons why digital ids will be forced and one of the big ones is because bigtech companies do not want to invest into looking after the content, e.g. misinformation, bullying, etc. Not to mention the inability of companies to control the age of users, and everyone knows this is not in the interest of advertisers.
Criticism is good but it also has to offer some options. Saying everything is bad bad does not help. All in all I have kids and it is very difficult to filter all of their internet traffic and I am not your average parent. Kids are reading crap and get brainwashed everyday, and the idea that you should just let them is ridiculous. Cyber bullying is a thing and I wonder what would you do when your kids get to be on the receiving side.
IMO this is trying to blame politicians who represent their electorate who wants this without acknowledging that the issue is in huge ad funded companies whose interest is to gather all that private data without any supervision or filtering. BTW Data is constantly being leaked from large companies as well, not only gov entities.
In relation to guesstimates the author jumps to possible conclusions without sufficient proof.
What would the author suggest to fix the main issues though?
We’ve had eID for a long time and I’m fine with it becoming more prominent online. Same for age verification, once we settle on a way to do it without US/Palantir being involved in the process.
It seems unlikely that a true Zero Knowledge Proof system for things like age verification would ever be allowed.
Also, remote attestation doesn't work that way and for good reason. Under a true ZKP system, a single defector (extracted/leaked/etc key) would be able to generate an infinite number of false attestations without detection.
> It seems unlikely that a true Zero Knowledge Proof system for things like age verification would ever be allowed
This article is about EU age verification which is specifically and definitely stated as using zero knowledge proof in all technical docs that I've seen:
https://eudi.dev/2.5.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...
Not a fan, but unfortunately a "digital proof of citizenship" seems to inevitable due to the en-shitification of the internet, autocratic state actor's doctrines to destabilise free societies through disinformation that matches well with social media's en-rage-ment business model, and the more recent AI slopification / AI bots running wild.
The question is whether citizens can build enough pressure for such verification systems to be state-based and truly zero-knowledge (akin to the EU's) versus having the private sector 'verify' each user to siphon data, profit off it (Thiel's Persona) and fortify surveillance-capitalism and autocratic administrations.
At the moment in the UK (where any mention of digital ID sends half the population mental) you have to email a whole raft of ID docs and personal data to estate agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors etc. to get an ID check done. Or use a private ID service that can have a cost associated and may not be any more secure than my passport scan sitting in someones M365 mailbox. You can't know.
I'd be happy to have a government service replace all that nonsense, where a one-time challenge code could verify my ID. There is now a UK.gov "One Login" authentication used by other government services that is essentially a digital ID as far as I can see. It just needs to be made mandatory for ID checks by law.
Such a service can also be used for age verification with the correct privacy controls in place, far better than all the dodgy age verification services that exist now.
Digital ID and age verification are going to be a part of the internet going forward. I'd rather have a government service that (in a functioning democracy) has accountability to the citizens that use it. ID verification is also a natural monopoly, so the government picks a winner anyway.
Many countries have digital IDs for years now.
It's not for digital IDs. It's for surveillance.
Digital IDs are fine (and desired even) if you are only requiring it for GOVERNMENT (same entity that released them) communication. Push for age control is scheme to make that info available for private companies and that's the trojan horse here.
> that info
That info being: {"over_18": true} or maybe {"over_16": true, "over_18": false} with a government signature.
Might be a problem if you've got a Vatican ID, I suppose? Though they don't participate in this system of course.
DEAD, archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260426040218/https://juraj.bed...
Thanks, we'll put that in the toptext too.
Archive returns 503 ATM....
Where is the big to what we have now?
Not much more freedom, but the control is outside voters reach.
Just ask Nicolas Guillou
A digital ID not based on EU hardware should be taken down with prejudice. It's a direct threat to national security. US companies and, by extension, US government authorities have control over every popular endpoint (mobile phones, desktop OS).
Besides, if someone wants a digital ID, it already exists in many countries. Phones with NFC chips can read many passports, e.g. Germany has an "electronic passport" since 2005. It's barely used, though, because it's bullshit.
To understand the age verification push, got to follow the incentives[0].
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfukJ6uVHXs
Interesting point about ZKP systems. The challenge with age verification is balancing privacy with enforcement — any centralized solution creates a honeypot for data breaches.
How's this going to work now that there are, arguably, already more AI agents online than humans? Or close to it. Most of the web if fake AI slop already. Many websites are more crawled by bots than by real people.
We'll need to apply for digital IDs for bots and AI agents?
ai;dr
> There will be no single EU app, despite what the honchos of EU say.
This shows that the EU commission is systematically lying.
This problem used to exist in the past with Leyen - she is ultimately a lobbyist and that has to stop. Friedrich Merz too by the way - there is a reason why recent polls indicate that the german voters want him out of politics at once.
The EU needs to reform. Right now lobbyists have too much abuse-power. The age sniffing is a great example here - isn't it suspicious how this goes in sync right now in so many countries? Who is paying for this? Nobody needs that, except for some companies.
> Big platforms must verify age for certain content.
But why is their concern, suddenly my concern? I see no need to be in support of any law that would require people to ID in order to access information on the world wide web. That's very obviously the real goal and agenda - everyone with a bit of brains sees this.
> It is the same EU that hates these American corporations and wants EU alternatives for everything
That's not true. The EU commission I consider a lobbyist group, for instance. They lie and lie and lie.
The EU parliament is not much better - you can buy legislation quite easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
Nothing will seriously changed. The current way how the EU is structure is totally wrong; and it will not be fixed because those in the system, benefit from it financially. See the recent attempt to force EU taxpayers to pay more for those goons. They constantly try to inflate their own budget, at our cost.
> yet no one can make a phone usable for age verification without the blessing of Google
Indeed. We have total incompetence at the leadership level. It should be replaced with technical prowess, but as long as lobbyists such as Leyen are running the show, nothing will change. See the corruption scandals when she was still in Germany. Interestingly the AfD is also full of that, yet voters don't see it - Weidel was working for many years for Goldman sucks. So a next generation of lobbyists will replace the older generation soon. That's why this system how it is, is unfixable. It is broken by design.
When did any EU representative ever lie about this? It has been very clear from the beginning that every member state would make their own apps.
I don't really see what internal German politics and lobbying has to do with anything.
As for the "Google" part, that's up to the member states to decide. In essence, the law states that apps should be secure and untampered. It doesn't specify any remote attestation partner, nor even the strict need for remote attestation although it's hard to accomplish any kind of phone-based authentication security without it. Android's native attestation solution also exists and works for phones sold without Google services, though it's an absolute pain to work with.
Sailfish, pmOS, or any other mobile OS could implement the security requirements if they ever get enough serious popularity to convince governments to make apps for them.
Site seems slashdotted? Or HNd? Do we call it that here? :)
Some call it the HN hug of death. Same like with Reddit.