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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.
And then once you have universal registration - you can be tracked all over the internet with ONE ID - including all your political commentary!
And the Great Eye of fire sees all. Come to think of it, this was discussed in the film "The Circle". Not a great film, but it puts these ideas into a realistically scary context. Does this idea of removing choice from whether or not we WANT to be registered concern anyone else?
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
https://xkcd.com/927/
Who actually believes that any of these "one standard" things REDUCE the number of different accounts you have to have?
I'll put it in a pile with all my other pan-industry platforms for online registration, e-identity and data services.
Obligatory XKCD link omitted because everybody's seen it. Really. Everyone on the internet. Don't bother.
That is all.
Haven't we been down this road several times before?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
How come no one thought of this before?
Oh wait, they did. It didn't work out because it is not as great of an idea as it sounds at first.
You have one logon for ALL of your online accounts. That's great only one ID and password to remember to get access to everything you do online. Of course, that also means only one ID and password to hack for someone ELSE to get access to all of your online accounts. Then once they do, aside from the losses you might take from the hack, how do you get your account back?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Talk about too many eggs in one basket! This is hoarding everyone's most precious eggs into one giant egg silo!
Not to mention this is almost THE nightmare account in terms of online privacy: one account for everything, linked to your real name through government ID. It could only be worse if it were controlled by a corporation rather than a government...at least you should be able to vote to keep marketers out!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This isn't killing registration, it's REQUIRING one. A really horrible one.
It is like facebook, only forcing people to use it - FOR EVERYTHING.
It's not just the end of online anonymity, it's the total destruction of what remains of privacy.
Look, I do NOT want to use the same ID for my Medical history for ANYTHING. No one should be able to know what ointments I am getting or for what, just because I sent them an email.
People have a right to privacy, even if most morons ignore it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
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.
The banks in the Netherlands use a system called iDEAL which is used for online transactions. It is run through banking website and uses a challenge and response system combined with the presence of a user's bank card.
They branched out recently to create a new side system called iDIN. The premise is also simple: If a bank can already authenticate a person for the purposes of transactions, why not also do it for web logons? I'm starting to see many services adopt it, starting with the government and tax department which now give you the option of logging in with your government login (DigiD) or iDIN.
All that is fine providing it's restricted to services who absolutely have to positively identify me. Facebook and the like can fuck right off if they are thinking of adopting something similar.