this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Do you believe that age verification online is to protect children? Likewise for mandatory backdoors to secured data and encryption bans?
Digital id can be abused and controlled in ways a physical id cannot. There are some similarities to the idea of having a 'cashless society' but it also has unique problems.
Because a digital id is likely to become much more convenient, it's not a stretch that it becomes mandatory to verify for services that previously had no need to. You have another reply talking about museums and buses, which you think is ridiculous, but when it becomes so simple to do these things can creep in.
We don't know the implementation being planned, so it is hard to say for sure - but I don't want it and believe it should be resisted as strongly as possible.
I agree.
That being said... Internet has changed. What used to be a private, personal space for a bunch of nerds, became yet another aspect of "real life".
Banks live here, streaming services, whole companies exist solely online, most of the world's finances is done online, etc., etc.
Unless you pull a Bartmoss' DataKrash, you cannot go back from that.
And where the money is, crime is. I know I'll be downvoted for saying this, but it's just a fact of life: the Internet is being used to hurt a lot of people daily. And we have no means of preventing that.
Digital ID might be a step in the right direction - it would certainly curb the impact that misinformation/rage campaigns using bot networks have.
I remember when the US imposed Internet sanctions on russia, effectively cutting it off from its services (for all of two days before they found ways around it), and the entire r/Conservative became a ghost town. Something like four posts were published in the span of those two days, one of them asking if the whole subreddit is really just bots from russia.
If every user was verified, this wouldn't be a thing.
And yes, I understand the dangers of letting a government control/see what I'm browsing online. And yes, I understand that the current UK administration is nowhere near capable of designing a system that's even on the same plane of existence as the solution to the underlying issue.
But I also understand that if we don't do anything at all, we'll end up in the same state as the US - broken and divided, with russia reaping the rewards.