Beware state surveillance of your lives – governments can change for the worse
2020 editorial, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacyinternational.org&#x2F;long-read&#x2F;4074&#x2F;looming-disaster-immunity-passports-and-digital-identity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacyinternational.org&#x2F;long-read&#x2F;4074&#x2F;looming-disa...</a><p><i>&gt; A digital ID that proves immunity will raise serious human rights issues. And the failure of the digital ID industry to deal with the issues of exclusion, exploitation and discrimination puts the entire industry under question ... The most important message for the industry is, perhaps, that you don&#x27;t have to provide a solution to every conceivable use-case for identity. This pandemic should form a check on the hubris of the digital identity industry.</i><p>2021: Linux Foundation &amp; others launch an interoperable blockchain to unify human identity across all US states and all countries, enabling linking of phones, online wallets, driver&#x27;s licenses, EU digital ID, offline activity (e.g. travel, entering buildings) and potentially future central bank digital currencies with kill switches (e.g. prevent kids from exceeding monthly quota of sweets&#x2F;candy purchases, or some cross-border transactions), <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;forums&#x2F;discussi.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;article&#x2F;linux-foundation-readies-global-covid-certificate-network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;forums&#x2F;discussi.com&#x2F;index.ph...</a><p><i>&gt; For health passes to work globally, helping countries to restart economies and reopen borders, they need to be trusted globally. Through the Global COVID Certificate Network, Linux Foundation Public Health is working to address this challenge by bringing together a network of trusted and interoperable Trust Registries, so that the holder of a certificate can use it whenever they need and wherever they are. IBM is excited to collaborate with Linux Foundation Public Health on this important initiative at this critical time in our history.</i><p>In other news, mobile phone numbers can be used to obtain the real-time geolocation of a phone.  Both T-Mobile and AT&amp;T recently announced data breaches of customer data, including phone number and other identifying information, for millions of customers.<p>The US government lost the entire OPM classified database on security-cleared personnel, one of the highest-value information systems on high-value humans.<p>So who exactly are we going to trust to run this global blockchain of human identity? IBM? What&#x27;s their historical track record on cybersecurity and governance of protecting humans? And no, many &quot;decentralized&quot; companies enforcing identical policy does not make the resulting system any less centralized and fragile.<p>We need to collect less data, not more. If the West wants a social credit system, at least have the decency of emulating China by stating explicit public policy goals and owning the societal  consequences. If Western countries don&#x27;t want a China-style social credit system, then new legislation may be needed to encode this societal value, or to clarify Constitutional principles. But it should be a governance and policy decision, not an accidental consequence of &quot;tech&quot; infrastructure.<p>Let&#x27;s remember that &quot;Covid Contact Tracing&quot; via phones was not especially successful in adoption or changing of outcomes. Even when tracing data was available, some local governments made decisions which ignored the data. Yet, every phone now carries closed-source binaries to track not only the human user, but neighboring devices belonging to humans. With this track record of non-utility, what is the justification for expanding health surveillance interoperability to every aspect of online, offline and economic life?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodhealthpass.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodhealthpass.org&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustoverip.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustoverip.org&#x2F;</a>