End of September, Switzerland will vote for E-ID. A big threat for our privacy as it will widely used for tons of new use cases.
Behind the government pitch of an “open source project, completely optional” hides big tech industry… Which will make it mandatory to access their services.
What are your thoughts on that ?
#Switzerland #Privacymatters
private ids where always the scope of the privacy movement. However, it may as such present other challenges which can include age based discrimination. It as such must be implemented wisely.
Age is already being weaponised against us (child protection, etc), this shouldn’t be like that - We can already see what kind of power governments hold. Ageism is what will ultimately destroy us.
I have not yet looked into it.
I will vote in favour if:
- The E-ID platform is controlled by the government and is fully open source
- Platforms only get a single binary information for age verification if the person is old enough or not and does not get any identifiable information.
- The government platform does not get any info about what service is doing the request. So the government controlled ID platform cant log what service the person uses.
If any of these points are not fulfilled with the planned implementation I will have to weigh the risks.
Its not fully open source actually. Just the App, not the infrastructure or what and who’s behind .
https://github.com/swiyu-admin-ch contains far more than just the client. Only a certain component where they had to rely on a proprietary solution is closed source. Everything else is in the open.
In Belgium we do have e-ID and we had it for years.
If in any of the circles there is only BigTech then indeed you are right it is a threat.
In Belgium though I can access my official document with some of these (honestly I don’t remember which, but AFAIR It’sMe is one option) but more importantly there are some options with some decoupling, e.g. SMS (arguable as one must have a phone number usually via BigTelco) but, last and not least :
- a card reader with your physical ID card and its chip with https://eid.belgium.be/en/what-eid which has had Linux packages for years
- just learned about it yesterday which is why I’m excited to clarify this, a 2-step authentification app which does NOT have to be from BigTech, e.g. Ente Auth https://ente.io/auth/ which is FOSS and available on F-Droid
which means as long as at least one of these alternative is available then IMHO we can get some of the benefits without the centralization risk.
Those aren’t eID. They are a way to authenticate using CSAM.
There are different weights tied an authentication method, card reader scores highest.
From the top of my head there’s email, sms, totp, card reader, eiDAS and itsme® (which I avoid because it’s proprietary and controlled by a 3rd party).
There’s a list of properties a service can request when accessing data via ACM/IDM, for example your ssn, name, etc.
You can read your eID with local software too, with the aptly named eid viewer. Click on the picture in the overview and drag it into a text editor to see the entire exportable xml.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s up to the the service that’s using the Belgian e-id to enable some of the options or not. For example, the website where I check my payroll only works through itsme or with a card reader — no TOTP or SMS 2FA. It’s a big issue because itsme refuses to run when you don’t pass Google’s safety net.
I’m talking about public services. For private services I have no idea what they all do and, as importantly, what they are legally bound to do. I would hope that obviously they would have to provide at least 1 solution that doesn’t rely on any third party, e.g at least provide the card reader with legal Belgian ID option (which seems to be what they offer you, so IMHO that’s good enough), but I don’t know.
ItsMe not running is pretty good in terms of privacy because their entire business model is, and correct me if I am wrong, to be an intermediary. I didn’t check what data they share but I’d be pleasantly shocked if it was none.
The card reader might seem slightly inconvenient or outdated but there is no intermediary and it is, AFAICT, secure because it’s based on well established cryptography.
PS: it’s also fun because you can play with PAM and thus, I didn’t try that, login or get
suandsudowith your ID card.It doesn’t matter whether it’s a private or public service if they both use the same auth provider (beId). I wouldn’t be surprised if the SMS/TOTP options went away completely at some point for our “security”.
A different issue is that itsme is often the only option when doing things on mobile. Sure, you can avoid it for now, but it’s getting increasingly inconvenient to do so, unfortunately. I try to express my disappointment to itsme every now and then about the fact that they require Google’s SafetyNet and that the Connective Plugin needed to activate itsme in the first place doesn’t even work on Linux, but to no avail. They sent me a detailed email about setting up a Windows VM to get it working so credit where it’s due for the effort, but the situation is still bad…
itsme is often the only option when doing things on mobile
Indeed that’s why TOTP, via e.g. Ente Auth, was a good surprise. I didn’t see it until now and I believe that’s the mobile alternative to ItsMe.
That’s what I was saying — sometimes the TOTP option is not available at all for certain services. Ente, Aegis, Bitwarden, etc won’t save you there and itsme remains the only option on mobile when that’s the case.
That’s actually a choice made by the service. The onboarding document has the options listed and they get to choose, which is imho stupid. Just offer all options.
Service A has email enabled, service B doesn’t. Since ACM/IDM is SSO you can first authenticate with service A with your email code and then go to service B already authenticated.
Should be illegal IMHO
You can not just say that it is a threat to privacy. Its design improves privacy as we finally can ID ourselves, where it has always been required, without actually giving our identity to online services.
Just required for few services. Not it will be used more broadly
Did you read the law? It explicitly prohibits broader usage without the necessary new laws to allow them to do so.
I known, but its still up to the provider. And to prove its unnecessary will takes so much efforts. There’s too much lack in this law from my point of view. Instead, to prove our age for example, we could get TOKENS with age verification that are completely anonymous.
I mean that is exactly how it works. And if a private company wants to verify your age while violating the law they can do that already, just don’t use their service then.
I think avoiding functioneren creep will be a certain issue.
Belgium has such an e-id for nearly 10 years now. It works pretty good and acces to your personalia data is granular.
If only age verification is needed, the request will only grant you birth date.
Comanies that want to use it need to be vetted and their acces to your data is centrally regulated.
If only age verification is needed, the request will only grant you birth date.
I always wonder why they don’t minimize data further. “Age of Majority reached: Yes” seems like it should be good enough.
The German one supports that. It will also tell you exactly what data is transferred to the service in question.
But because Germany is Germany, the eID is rarely even implemented.
centrally regulated.
Any privacy freak who did a review on ItsMe? I just shared minutes ago https://lemmy.ml/post/36346569/21174131 that I don’t trust them but maybe I’m just paranoid. The fact that they are regulated means little, Meta and Google also are and they legally siphon everything we let them.
I’m in favour of it.
Contrary to the last time this was proposed, the government is in control of it instead of private corporations.
This will also be an alternative to any of the current online ID verification, which involve sending photos of your ID, videos of it and videos of yourself to some random third party for verification.
My point of views is it will be used more broadly, in every services. So, even if it will be “optional”,there will be no option to choose not to use it.
There is an article in the proposed law that e-ID is only allowed to be required for actions, where the law explicitly requires authentication.
In this proposed law there is no article that explicitly forces services to require a ID
So it only applies to services that used to require identification since a long time, lime buying alcohol, money laundering protection, some government stuff you had to do physically prior etc.
But there is a new law coming which sadly did mot get a referendum, that requires age verification for 18+ media like video and games. But this law will take effect no matter if e-ID is accepted or not. So if e-ID was declined, you would have to scan the compete ID, do a liveness selfie and send it to private companies like Netflix to watch 18+ stuff there.
With e-ID, you can proof you’re old enough without revealing name, gender, body hight etc.
Please inform yourself correctly before spreading nonsense
Mm yes the law, a thing that can never be changed, that big tech definitely doesn’t have power to influence, and a concept that other countries definitely won’t be “inspired” by
In Switzerland, any law changes can be prevented by a referendum
So, no, in Switzerland, the law can not just be changed.
“Can be”, we know that citizens do not have criticism sense for technologies matters
Yes, but the e-ID won’t change that.
If no e-ID is existent, you’ll have to upload a scan of your real world ID instead, with all unneeded data included.
I use my ID maybe 1x per year at the moment.
The ides of EID is to make it usable to access commons services such are bank, streaming, alcohol shop, sex shop and many else…which will make is use in many context where is unused at the moment.
Switserland is quite unique. They have referenda for big changes and are pretty conservative. Besides from that, they’re all armed and battle ready ;-)
As you mentioned. There’s a new law coming without referendum. Today you’ll need it to guy alcohol. Tomorrow streaming After tomorrow access to public transport
The open web forum in my picture exists. You can have a look. They dictate the rules. Its public information :)
Yes because that law did not get a measly 50k signatures. So there is no need to vote.
Because people are not involved in the digital topics as they don’t understand it.
Am I witnessing democracy right now ? Wow it’s like people collectively decide about key topics, amazing. Go Switzerland !
It’s not real democracy as the government motivate people to vote yes or no, and the government is completely corrupted. But yeah, it looks close to a democracy
Who is “the government” in Switzerland exactly? I see people in favour and against it in “the government” of Switzerland. Or is “the government” just the politicians that disagree with you?
I meant the politicians:)
You’re just spoiled.
Switzerland is the only country that I know has direct democracy. The others have indirect democracies where you vote politicians (or parties here in Slovakia) and they decide on your behalf what they want.
Agee there’s kinda direct democracy. But check out, its public. How many top level politics are paid by insurances ? 50-80 people ?^^
For me a democracy is a government not funded by private companies.
Then do something about it: https://www.no-lobbying.ch/
This is so cool. Thank you for the link
For me a democracy is a government funded by funds that are not stolen away by an Eurofund embezzlement mafia.
You are not required to vote. You will not be punished if you abstain from your vote. You are completely free to chose “yes” or “no” based on your own judgings.
Isn’t that exactly what democracy is about?
Who decides what I’m voting yes or no on?
There are two basic scenarios:
- The legislative authority is drafting a new law. This law can be challenged and will then be voted on (this is the case for the E-ID law)
- A suggestion for a new law can be raised by citizens. This law will then be voted on.
The thing is plenty of politics are paid by insurances and other big companies. Those people influence most of the voters which makes it unbalanced
Indeed, the lobbying is nasty and the party financing is not as transparent as it could be.
But discrediting the whole system as undemocratic because of those “minor flaws” is just not fair IMO.
I posted above already, but repeating for visibility. There is an initiative in the works right now to combat this: https://www.no-lobbying.ch/
Maybe not all the system is corrupted, but when I found that Switzerland just follow the rules defined by the open wallet forum in this case. I’ve doubts
Do you have the same issue with the W3C or the Wifi Alliance?
I don’t
