The “Wallet” Identity that means VOn der Leyen. A possible nightmare
The European Commission on Thursday unveiled plans to introduce an EU-wide digital ID.
If approved, the plan would allow people to use an app to prove their identity online, both to verify their age and to check their driver's license.
The EU plans to start testing the app, which is called Wallet, in October 2022, when it hopes it will be the basis of an agreement between member countries.
The Commission says it needs a new identification system because it wants EU residents to retain control of their data, rather than sharing it with tech giants like Google and Facebook. Currently, online identity checks are done through these tools, such as verification via Google profile or via Facebook. In this way, private companies have become "certification bodies", with immense power from the point of view of data management.
"Whenever an app or website asks us to create a new digital identity or to access it easily via a large platform, we have no idea what actually happens to our data," said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a speech last September. Instead of using your Facebook profile to log into other apps, for example, the Commission proposes “a secure European electronic identity… A technology where we can control ourselves what data and how the data is used”.
The Commission also hopes that digital IDs will help fight online fraud, encourage people to feel safer when using online services, and boost the economy. A McKinsey Global Institute study states that countries with a digital identification scheme will be able to increase their gross domestic product by 3 to 13 percent by 2030.
Some EU countries have already implemented their national digital identities, but have a mixed record. According to the Commission, 19 electronic identification systems are used by 14 EU countries, but "the uptake is low, their use is cumbersome and business cases are limited".
The goal is that your phone essentially hosts your national ID card, which you would connect to the identification app to be identified whenever needed. Von Der Leyen states that it is not a "Federalist" discourse that is linked to "European Citizenship", but only a way of not leaving the data in the hands of US multinationals …
Will it really be like this, can we trust it? No, the project should not be taken in a poke, rather it must be taken apart piece by piece.
The nightmare is to get to the Chinese "Social Scoring", that is the "Social Score": that is, that you are evaluated for what you read or publish on the internet. Imagine a world in which your every comment or post was perfectly identified, linked to your person, judged or censored, to the point of taking away the possibility of accessing the internet. That identity is perfectly connected to every asset, financial or physical, in its possession. The project would lead to the total control of the person, of his choices, being able to cancel him economically and digitally with a click. Without thinking about the practical aspects: if during a trip your mobile phone falls, for example, from a boat, what do you do? You are literally dead. If it's stolen from you, even worse.
This is why digital identity, the "Wallet" is a huge danger. Its function, its use, present a huge risk to personal freedoms. A project to be stopped or made usable in an extremely limited number of cases, which is not binding and leaves the possibility of using traditional identification tools as well. A potential attack on personal freedom that, as always, is done by Brussels with superficiality and subduedness.
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The article The “Wallet” Identity which means the VOn der Leyen. A possible nightmare comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lidentita-wallet-che-vuople-la-von-der-leyen-un-possibile-incubo/ on Sat, 05 Jun 2021 08:11:22 +0000.