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

Only a Matter of Time

[WheezyJoe]

Gonna happen eventually. Trusting your online identity to Google or Yahoo or some outfit that may go bankrupt someday is becoming more and more stupid, in a world where having a persistent, secure, accountable and trustworthy e-mail account unique to you is becoming essential to pay your bills, do your taxes, get your Medicare, and other plain life stuff. People are afraid of government, sure, but Google or Microsoft or AOL/Verizon do not owe you an e-mail account, and can probably shut it down any time they want (you ain't paying for it, for example, and if they go bankrupt, who ya gonna sue to pull it back from backups?) Smart guys can roll their own servers, of course, or work for a university their whole life. But that's still no guarantee that their e-mails are coming from then - the server gets hacked and someone uses it to steal your tax return, there's nobody to turn to.

I see a national e-mail account as an inevitability, like getting a passport, run by the Post Office for example, as soon as government don't wanna pay for letting people do business any other way (like paper). Just a matter of when. Maybe not soon, but someday.