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

Great idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

And then once you have universal registration - you can be tracked all over the internet with ONE ID - including all your political commentary!

Re: Great idea...

[ArmoredDragon]

Germany has never had any problems with overbearing governance, so stop the fear mongering and show me your papers, please.

How come no one thought of this before?

[Attila Dimedici]

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?

Re:How come no one thought of this before?

[Attila Dimedici]

The problem you are pointing out is not so much that they think they are more important than they are (although that is an element to it). The problem is that everybody who comes up with this idea thinks, "I can make money doing this." Which leads everyone else to think, "Why should they make the money? Why not me?"
A related problem is that whoever sponsors the single sign one that become THE single sign on will forever after have a competitive advantage over their direct competitors in whatever their business is. The result being that those competitors will not sign up for it (for good reason).

What could possibly go wrong?

[GameboyRMH]

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!

Re:Commercial use

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure.

Technically it never starts out that way. Just some good intentions. That's how these laws work. A frog will always jump out of a hot pot - you just put the frog in cold water and turn the heat up slowly over time.

Nobody would buy into an internet ID # scheme that would track you everywhere because nobody wants to be traced. You just start with a government ID used for shopping and eGovernment. How could that possibly be evil? It's just one ID for all your government services. And shopping. It'd be really great to use this for shopping. And health services. We already need a central repository for our health records so it should be there too. Oh and hey all of our banking accounts should tie into this too. Its convenient and it really helps government crack down on crime. Well now that we have you spending habit it'd be a good idea to give you tax credits on your health if you eat buy healthy food instead of junk food. While we're at it you should use your to register your car too and the auto insurance associated with it. Oh hey, your driving record says you speed so that should affect your government health tax credits too. In fact now that 80% of the internet uses your ID we should roll it out for Hulu and forum services too, as a convenience and let Facebook tie your account to it too.

Oh hey since we have IDs tied to facebook we can finally solve this troll problem. In fact we should require your government ID to be used to login to Facebook to verify it because everybody agrees hate speech needs to be properly penalized.

And that's how it works Charlie Brown.

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.