Or have to go through great lengths to escape.
In my country you can’t buy any medicine without showing your ID… I mean, you technically can, but if you are registered they “give” like an 80% discount, so everyone thinks it’s a great deal, not realizing that’s the normal price, they are just pretending you can still go and buy a simple cold medicine without sharing your ID, phone, email, and street address with the drug store and whoever they decide to sell that information to, you just have to pay absurdly more. Yeah, you can lie about all the other information, but not really about your ID number. Probably soon, to get the “discount”, you are going to have to verify your email or phone number as well.
- You have to hand over a huge amount of personal info about yourself & others to estate agents when renting a property - which they then sell to advertisers & you have no opt-out
- Similarly, landords can require you to use a proprietary app for rent payments, which of course collects & sells your private data too
- Burner phones are effectively illegal (telcos are required to collect & retain ID of every phone number they register)
- Telcos and ISPs are required to collect & retain logs of all your activities for a minimum of two years
- In some cities police can detain & search you & your property for no reason, and require you to remove any facial coverings
- It’s illegal to refuse to hand over passwords to cops (6 years jail is the max term I think)
- Police can hack your device, take over your social media, delete or modify your data for an investigation, or survey any digital device if they “think it is likely to be used by someone subject to a warrant” (this particular bill was announced and then rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours to give the public as little time as possible to protest it
- Some social media sites (including github(wtf)) are now required to age-verify all users beginning next month. Which will obviously lead to mass leaks & breaches of private data which the gov will turn a blind eye to
This is Australia. I hate it here
If Europe doesn’t fight back strong enough, Chat Control will be one such thing. All your messages being scanned by a “black box” system. Hopes are on the European Parliament and societal pressure to cancel this now. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/reality-check-eu-council-chat-control-vote-is-not-a-retreat-but-a-green-light-for-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance-and-the-end-of-right-to-communicate-anonymously/
License plate readers
ID verification for phone numbers.
ALMOST every bank now forces you to have a phone application to authorize payments and each banks implements it in their own way, no standardized way like TOTP (RFC 6238) or Passkeys (WebAuthn), and sometimes those apps force you to use a verified phone (no custom ROM basically) because of security. So if you have no battery (or phone number, because some banks still send you codes trough SMS), you can’t authorize transactions.
Most banks use 3rd party, non local AI companies to verify your identify with your face.
Chile :3c
Makes me curious if there is a per country list of banks that provide an option NOT to have that. I know that if my bank were to do force such limitations I’d consider moving to another one.
You can’t escape when you currently appears life in one of the millons cams anywhere and even with this life in YouTube, additional to the surveillance of big corporations, banks and the own ISP. Privacy nowadays is relative, you can only patch the biggest holes. 100% privacy is stay at home and reading a book with the smartphone turned off.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=live+webcams+around+the+world
https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam.html
etc… adding millons more used by police and govs with face recognition soft.
Chat control. Whatever these fuckos who are pushing for this in Brussels are smoking, this must stop.
You can escape from chat control by using a decentralized protocol like XMPP though.
Japan just hooked up the national health insurance to the national ID.
Hmm… so what does it change? Before you could have health insurance without using your ID?
Yes the “my number card” (national ID) was mostly a volunteer thing but now that it’s needed for health insurance it’s required of everyone
That’s quite interesting, did you have other sort of compulsory ID before the national one? Like, what did you use to register to stuff, like enrolling in school or college, opening a bank account or getting a retirement plan, etc.
In my country we have both the state and national ID. I guess very long ago you could use your state ID to register to stuff, but as they pushed for more standardization everything started to require your national ID instead, and your state ID card was more a proof that you are who you claim to be (like, you have to collect a parcel somewhere and show it belongs to you, or if you are stopped by the police you can show your state ID)… but usually people just use the driver’s license because it has both ID numbers and your picture, so it’s a valid document for everything.
For a lot of people for a long time your insurance card (that didn’t have a photo) was the only “identification” you had. Otherwise you had to bring your school ID, work ID etc.
Most people don’t have drivers licenses cause they take the train. When you sign up for banks etc you usually have to get a bunch of official documentation from the local ward office with your information.
Proof of identity in Japan has always been a bit of a hazy problem. You sign most documents still with a family stamp, so the idea of what legally is defined as identifying is kind of vague.
Most local offices aren’t networked up, so when you move you have to register with your local ward office and the japanese beauricratic army goes and gets the previous ward office to fax over your info.
“My Number” is the japanese governments attempt to get all that stuff wired together in one database.
In my country it’s becoming ever more common that when I visit someone and that person lives in an apartment, the building has a doorman/security and they ask for my id.
Also all supermarkets want to know your id number, but there at least I can say “no thanks”.
Sidetracked a bit but last week I was in the UK. I tried to visit a website (not porn actually, just private messaging on BlueSky) and it asked to verify my age. Initially I thought “Meh… OK… let’s see the process” which then lead to installing an app maybe (I’m not sure tbh as I was in rush). Clearly I didn’t want to do it because the DM was potentially urgent (scheduling to meet someone ASAP) … so what did I do? I switched from my browser to my VPN, connected from Austria, refreshed… no age verification. It took me a grand total of 5s to bypass the system.
TL;DR: maybe you can actually escape even though you are convinced you can’t.
