alt Hacker News> This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement.
Granting the premise for argument's sake, why should governments do this? Why can't private companies do it?
That said, I've long thought that the U.S. Postal Service (and similarly outside the U.S.) is the perfect entity for providing useful user certificates and attribute certificates (to get some anonymity, at least relative to peers, if not relative to the government).
The USPS has:
- lots of brick and mortar locations
- staffed with human beings
- who are trained and able to validate
various forms of identity documents
for passport applications
Now back to the premise. I want for anonymity to be possible to some degree. Perhaps AI bots make it impossible, or perhaps anonymous commenters have to be segregated / marked as anonymous so as to help everyone who wants to filter out bots.
Replies
> why should governments do this? Why can't private companies do it?
A private company will inevitably be looking to maximize their profit. There will always be the risk of them enshittifying the service to wring more money out of citizens and/or shutting it down abruptly if it's not profitable.
There's also the accountability problem. A national ID system would only be useful if one system was widely used, but free markets only function well with competition and choice. It could work similar to other critical services like power companies, but those are very heavily regulated for these same reasons. A private system would only work if it was stringently regulated, which I don't think would be much different from having the government run it internally.
I think the main argument for having the government do it as opposed to the private sector is that the gov has a lot more restrictions and we, the people, have a say. At least theoretically.
Imagine if Walmart implemented an identity service and it really took off and everyone used it. Then, imagine they ban you because you tweeted that Walmart sucks. Now you can't get a rental car, can't watch TV, maybe can't even get a job. A violation of the first amendment in practice, but no such amendment exists for Walmart.
I used to think that, but recently had a really bad experience with a lot of runaround with them when we had to have our mail held for a few weeks while we sorted out a mailbox break-in. We would go to one post office that was supposed to have our mail and be told to go to another post office, then get redirected back to the first post office multiple times. And they kept talking about how they had to work out the logistics and everything was changing over and over. Some of the managers seemed to give my wife the wrong information to get rid of her.
There were a few managers who tried to help and eventually we got our mail but the way everything worked out was absurd. I think they could handle national digital identity except that if you ever have a problem or need special treatment to address an issue buckle up because you're in for a really awful experience.
The onboarding and day-to-day would probably be pretty good given the way they handle passport-related stuff though.