Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> I'm not sure what that means in practice but I e.g., am not sure that "identity theft" should be a scary thing if the other side of the system is working optimally.

For that, the US needs to follow what virtually all EU member states have done, and provide every citizen with a government-issued ID card with NFC that can be used to authenticate against a website (e.g. a bank), and browsers would need to agree on a web standard allowing interfacing with such cards (there is Web NFC but it's by far not enough).

The problem is, this is politically untenable in the US for a bunch of reasons - the right wing complains about "big government" and fears a "nanny state" that tracks everyone and everything, and the left wing complains because ID cards cost money and would exclude people without proper documentation.

Additionally, passports don't store your residential address and people don't necessarily want the government to know said address, which means they are useless to banks as a factor proving "person X lives at address Y".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: