I'm also thinking that it will become one of those catch-22 problems for recent immigrants, who need a bunch of papers to settle, but also need to settle to get those papers.

For example, the German government assumes that every resident has a fixed, official, registered address. However for various reasons, many people can't register their address. They might for instance live in an illegal sublet. Since they can't register, they can't get a tax ID, health insurance or a bank account, which in turn make it hard to get an apartment that lets them register.

Lawmakers often forget that millions of people aren't born into the system, and do not always fill certain preconditions like the native population.

Or, you know, it's may be by design? There are n number of countries where you'll be deported immediately if you don't have the right documents, precisely to discourage the kind of challenges you mentioned. The only difference between those countries and the EU is that they actually enforce their laws almost immediately while the EU (and to an extent, the US) don't. A fixed address is practically required in any part of the world to avail of government services, insurance, healthcare and banks, from Mozambique to Monaco.

People have a fixed address but can't register it. This is especially common with the sort of accommodation people get when they move to Germany.

It also affects Germans, but to a lesser extent since they register at their parents' house.

AFAIK, the US does not have a mandatory ID requirement ( nor does the UK ).

Birth certificates are kinda in the realms of manfatory and be it directly or indirectly (classed as child abuse in the case of the USA) illegal not to register a birth in many countries.

In the UK you have the 1953 Births and Deaths Registration Act requires a birth to be registered within 42 days of a child being born.

Also nice example that Google spat out here in the respect of the UK and trying to opt out not registering a birth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/23/man-refused-...

So given that, I'd say birth certificates have in many ways and thru various avenues of law in one country or another, kinda become mandatory years ago.

> Lawmakers often forget that millions of people aren't born into the system, and do not always fill certain preconditions like the native population.

That should be quoted and hanging upon the wall of every politician. Very easy to fall thru the net and undue social and mental stress trying to fix that when innocent and a local, dare imagine the nightmare of somebody less fortunate who just wants to have an honest life.

The aspect that Germany have a clear approach to dealing with those who they deem illegal, it clearly does not help those who fall into that definition without doing anything illegal. Rent the wrong place and suddenly the burden and fallout is placed upon the renter who becomes a victim of the process.

This isn't isolated to Germany, and the same thing patterns out in every country in one form or another.

In my experience, this is the case for the Netherlands as well!

I was at first perplexed when reading all the different requirements; it was hard trying to understand how to first approach 'the problem' to satisfy the circular dependencies in the requirements.

Thankfully, there was a lot of hand-holding involved between the HR department, the landlady (through a realtor), and the immigrant-friendly bank in order to allow us to bend the rules to solve the chicken/egg dilemma of residence/banking/insurance.

They don’t forget, they don’t care because those purple can’t vote for them by definition.

Being optimistic, which is perhaps not warranted here, but bear with me: The EU is perhaps one of the few places in the world where there will be controls mandated on the data. I'm not at all convinced they'll be anywhere near abuse-proof, but at least I would expect to see an attempt.

>The EU is perhaps one of the few places in the world where there will be controls mandated on the data.

For non-state actors. Government(s) will obviously get exemptions in ways we won't find out until later. Look at GDPR and the EU commission.

I don't know about other EU countries, but in France the CNIL is pretty damn serious at telling the government to back off and respect the GDPR.

> ... they'll be anywhere near abuse-proof, but at least I would expect to see an attempt.

All police-like institutions will likely have full access right from the beginning, because of child pornography, terror or other "serious crimes".

That will be softened and weakened by the time until someone finds out this system was misused for stalking some VIP or because police wanted to catch a guy who had 10 grams of weed.

It's all happened before, it will happen again.

The extremely high taxes of Europe are themselves a form of abuse.

These digital wallets and digital currency systems will just be used to enforce taxation.

Meanwhile, where do all those taxes go? To the welfare state (ie. pensions and healthcare for baby boomers), and to maintain the bureaucracy.

Taxes are not abuse, especially not pensions or healthcare. You do realize that in all likelihood your parents benefit from both, and so will you, unless ofc you are a lot more wealthy than most citizens.

Nobody said that taxes are abuse.

Hopefully the digital wallet will be leveraged to reduce the bureaucracy. We can’t continue like this without hurting ourselves.

EU governments are exempt from the requirements of GDPR. In some countries police can access large amounts of data without the need for a warrant. For example German police do not need a warrant to get passwords to email account, PIN numbers for mobile phones, mobile usernames, birthdates, telco information, or hospital data.

They do need a warrant for all the mentioned things in Germany (except birthdates if accessed in public registers).

The GDPR does apply to governments in general (see Article 2) but criminal law enforcement authorities are exempt.

Wait until you become unwanted or fall through the cracks and your wallet is blocked.

And this is different for status quo in what way? In every EU country the government can go to a bank and freeze your account via a warrant.

But at least right now it won't block you from viewing websites as an example. If this becomes commonplace then most websites with accounts will do this kind of identity detection.

Why wouldn't they? Think about it. If people's real identities are involved then they're less likely to be abusive, because everything tracks back to them. But it also means that websites like Facebook and pornhub might not let new users in without that kind of authentication.

in the US we had laws protecting the privacy of mail going through the postal service, and conversations over the phone. now facebook and google know our every thought and move.

new technology is like the wild west for govts and corporations, and you can hold a larger crowd hostage with a gun than you can with a knife.

That was my first thought as well. It could be a powerful weapon

I think you read too much into this.

It is a service that will allow say a Dane to use Danish NemID instead of a Swedish bankid when working in Sweden.

And it is not for monitoring you. It is for authenticating you in a manner that is explicitly under your control.

not monitoring yet.

It really doesn’t have anything to do with monitoring. You are being monitored a plenty, just not via this eu initiative.

If it can be used to monitor you it will be used to monitor you. Let’s not fool ourselves here.

So how exactly will the auth request be impossible log/trace? And is it really going to be implemented that way?

They are logged. These are just SAML federations, ForgeRock has a bunch of these rolled out across Europe.

They are logged, and law enforcement does get the logs on request.

Read the ToS.

It is my understanding that this is why China is developing their own cryptocurrency, to be able to track all uses (and users) of it. The Wall Street Journal reported on it:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-creates-its-own-digital-c...

That applies to uses inside China and outside China. I can see the NSA/USA wanting to do the same, as well as all the other countries in the world. This might be what actually kills all cryptocurrencies unless it becomes mandated that all citizens use it, which could lead to many outside a country having to also use it. But maybe there will be ways to scramble the tracking? Or maybe not, anyone looked at the design of China's cryptocurrency?

> The thing is that currently, the multitude of not centralized, authenticated system allows to remain anonymous or quasi anonymous for a lot of things.

I don't really think that is the case.

There was a big scandale in Denmark a couple of years [1]. Where a tabloid had bribed a person at Nets which is the main digital payment processing solutions in Denmark. As a result they could set up trackers on people whenever they used their credit card. Tracking where the went on honeymoon or had dinner etc.

If a second-rate tabloid can end up tracking individuals' people use of their credit cards. I'm pretty sure it should be manageable for most governments _if they want to_.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Se_og_H%C3%B8r_media_scan...

I don't know about today, but 15 years ago when my company held presentations about the value of print advertising that's grossly under bought, (with permission) we'd put everyone's favourite take out Pret sandwich in front of their seats, with the advertising sources on green fanfold line as placemats. We couldn't get better than 50 50 for exact choices but given the advantage of permission to obtain personal information we asked the secretaries with a (disclosed as payment for data) bribe. The line prints did the talking just as raw data - in 05 data mining was too precious for stunts and Xeon hadn't surpassed our ES45 alpha servers for system bandwidth.