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A comment on Quest Diagnostics says nearly 12M patients may have had data breached. Parent comment

Re:Quest Diagnostics says nearly 12M patients may have had d... by whack on Monday June 03, 2019 @05:26PM (#20088992)
I wonder if it makes sense for the government (or private sector) to develop an official identity database and provide identity-as-a-service. One which has a public "username" that is unique/permanent and can be freely given out - a private "key"/password that you should never ever hand out to anyone - and physical offices that you can go to with your passport and other evidence, in order to change your password when needed. You could then develop apps or APIs on top of this, in order to authenticate your identity whenever requested by a 3rd party.
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Re:Quest Diagnostics says nearly 12M patients may have had d... by kaybe on Monday June 03, 2019 @05:41PM (#20089147)
In Germany we have identity-as-a-service provided by post offices. You go there with an ID and the form and they send that form with confirmation to where it is needed. It's quite commonly used to open an account with an online bank, for example.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postident

(And I just see that the service is also offered by mailman as well, so they can come to you. Austria and Switzerland have similar services.)

edit: It's quite remarkable how sometimes people online say there should be something, and I'm like, yeah, we have that.. I wonder if it works the other way too. Probably.

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Re:Quest Diagnostics says nearly 12M patients may have had d... by maxheadroom on Monday June 03, 2019 @06:18PM (#20089523)
In Sweden, we have one as well but organised by the banks, called BankID[0]. There used to be an open-source client[1] for it but it looks dead, now.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_identification#Swed...

[1] - https://git.fribid.se/fribid/

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Re:Quest Diagnostics says nearly 12M patients may have had d... by bifrost on Monday June 03, 2019 @05:41PM (#20089145)
I suspect that won't happen with private industry because its unlikely to have a cost advantage and it wouldn't be mandatory.
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