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What are the pro/cons on the European Digital Identity?

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[-] animist@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago

I see the benefits but cannot trust that there won't be a breach and all that info will be sold leading to identity theft. Centralized systems have just been shown to fail over the past ten years.

[-] Dislodge3233@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago

Can't speak for all countries, but some countries like Estonia, identity is stored via asymmetric certs that can't be downloaded off your card. The only thing centralized afaik, is the authority cert. If that gets compromised, all signatures require a trusted timestamp, so you can easily invalidate signatures made with false or compromised certs.

[-] animist@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago

Okay that honestly sounds awesome and would be something I would be willing to do. Thank you for the info

[-] Dislodge3233@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah. Honestly, I prefer it to anything else. For example, if I'm signing a contract, then the signature comes with their personal ID number. If I need to sue, then

  1. I have their personal ID number
  2. I can electronically serve them the court documents
  3. I can log into their governments web portal
  4. Cross border stuff gets way easier.
[-] pabloscloud@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

'a technology where we can control'..

Oh no, who is "we"?

[-] Dislodge3233@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

A lot of it is open source. Look up web-eid on GitHub.

[-] daan@lemmy.vanoverloop.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

In Belgium we have a similar system, also fully open source. It's pretty cool that different countries are going to be using the same system soon.

The only thing that worries me is that the EU has this habit of creating open source libraries and releasing it under a permissive license, which is then incorporated in proprietary apps. This also happened with the corona contact tracing. Germany made their app open source, Belgium didn't, but I could just use the German app instead.

Another example is the Belgian eID stuff. Anything government related uses the open source tech, but ISPs and banks made their own proprietary app that does the same thing, and then everyone started using this crap. Now, the government started paying a third party to make yet another proprietary app that does the same thing, but no one cares about it or uses it.

[-] Dislodge3233@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah. This happened in Latvia (Poland too). Everything surrounding the e signature is proprietary and garbage. If you look at the source code for the drivers, they took GPL code trashed it and made it effectively proprietary.

Estonia is good about open sourcing it seems.

I think there needs to be a push to mandate this as open source based on some kind of access to information act. Public money shouldn't be funneled into proprietary trash imo.

[-] richardwonka@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

There was a movement Public Money, Public Code at some point, but I have lost track of it.

[-] richardwonka@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

About ten years late, so yay to them for geting started!

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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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