> we do, it’s just 80% privatized and a massive liability and inconvenience for citizens in ways that it doesn’t need to be

I am guessing to you are referring to how multiple private organizations can just poll for my social security number and I cant do anything about it? Yeah...

Yep. It’s a pain in the ass to deal with from our end, to put it mildly, but easy to piece it all together on the other, so it’s barely an impediment to bad actors. Since there are functionally no restrictions on government using parts of that system to grab all kinds of data from private sources, it’s a national ID connected directly to a crazy-powerful dragnet spying system, too. But inconvenient, insecure, and very hard to gain oversight of.

All the bad shit, none of the good. We may as well just have a national ID, it’d be less-bad than what we have now and might provide a jumping off point for making it a lot less-bad.

> constantly having to provide ID to everyone

I live in WA and for the past 5+ years I've only ever presented my driver's license to TSA agents at the airport.

...unless getting carded at the store for buying beer counts?

Doctor, dentist, employers, educational institutions. [edit] all financial institutions, lenders, et c

Unless you’re buying everything with cash, your purchasing history will be connected to it, too. Where you drive (license plate scanning and data-sharing is widespread). Facial recognition in stores means paying cash might not even help (seen the ones that highlight your face on a monitor when you walk in the store?)

But we have to pretend we don’t have a national ID system any time it might be convenient to a person to have that.

Right. I thought the parent post was talking about being challenged by government officials/police ("papers, please") on a regular basis - and not about private-sector use. A misunderstanding on my part.

I literally had to present ID this morning to buy cold medicine. Had to present ID lastweek to enter my kid's school then had to present ID to their pediatrician.

At least two of those instances make perfect sense. Meth's a thing and we don't like unidentified individuals fucking around on school grounds these days.

It's sad how in the state of Washington I have become accustomed to drawing my ID out on every transaction that involves confirming that I'm over 21 whereas cross the border into Idaho there's not a single time I have ever been asked to provide my ID in over 10 years. Clearly in Idaho they can take one look at me and go like well yeah clearly but such visual social technology is beyond the pale in the great creepy state of Washington. I'm a bit sad to think of what the children of today's children will be like when I am very old and they are very young. Maybe one day nobody will know what it was like to live in a society that was able to just tell things by looking at it.

The irony of individuals freaking out over the notion of what the wildly underfunded and largely indifferent federal government might do to collect data when private industry is surveilling basically every aspect of their existence for most of every day...

Private industry can't directly send someone to prison.

Soon: "our AI predicts that individual X has a 90% chance of committing a violent crime within the next semester"

Private industry sells your data to the government to do that.

"wildly underfunded"? Do you really believe what you just wrote here?

What private industry surveillance is mandatory? FFS.

Yerp I sure do, and if you're unconvinced I'm guessing you're either a libertarian or under 30, possibly both. There isn't a watchdog agency in the government that's currently operating at full staffing and funding levels, same with education. Sure our military budget is fairly flush but you get away from making people dead and agency budgets kinda go off a cliff.

User "forgetfreeman" has not actually looked up the budget of the US government.