Inside Germany's Plan To Kill Online Registrations (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Germany's corporate giants are promising a brave new future in the form of a single account -- one that will let you do your online shopping, get a flight and rent a car, all with no more registrations or repetitive passwords. Deutsche Bank (DB), Germany's biggest bank, announced Monday it's teaming up with other big firms to create a new company that will create the service. Users would enter their ID details just once before they can make all their online purchases across multiple sites. The partners -- which include Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler, insurer Allianz and publisher Axel Springer -- hope other firms will sign up to their vision. They're calling it a "pan-industry platform for online registration, e-identity and data services." The program could eventually be expanded to include government services. For example, drivers could apply for a new license through the system before their old one expires. The partners expect the program will be running in Germany by mid-2018, and they stressed it will be "secure" and comply with all European Union data protection rules.

Comments

Commercial use

[DrYak]

you can be tracked all over the internet with ONE ID - including all your political commentary!

Technically, this effort (like lots of other similar efforts in the past) aren't targetting forum, but mostly on-line shops, and e-government platforms.
- i.e.: things where you already need to identify with your real-world ID for obvious reasons. (e.g.: Because the goods need to be delivered to you in person).
They are all platform who already know you, and could (if they wanted to put the effort and collude together) trace you.

You're confusing with OAuth and OpenID platforms (like Google, Facebook, etc.) which are targetting forums.

Re:Commercial use

[mi]

Sell it as a way to prevent 'hate speech' and German government will be all over it.

And so will the American Left — fans of German government since 1930-ies.

That's bullshit

[allo]

Hello from Germany here.

It's the first time ever i heard from it. So i believe there is some initiative, but that does not mean, that this is "Germany's plan".
It's just another corporate dream. Or like our politicians tell us "the internet is new land for all of us" (Angela Merkel).

We have a thing, which is the ePerso (electronic identification built into our identity card), which nobody uses either.
In theory it can do a lot of cool stuff, including ideas like providing a pseudonymous identity to websites which is backed by a real identity you do not need to reveal, which should be able to be used to authorize for official tasks for tax and others and provide some more things.
In reality nobody is using it, nobody is implementing it and the people able to use such techie-stuff know the problems with it and are a bit paranoid (they may have a cause) about what the government may be able to do with it, when it gets established.

Back to the article: BULLSHIT. Nobody is killing online registrations, some companies are just trying to reinvent something again in ambitious ways. They may be soon some headlines about it then everybody forgets it again.