this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Imagine you have a strong opinion against some known ongoing genocide. Would you feel safe expressing yourself online about it? Or imagine that your country takes enough turns to become a dystopian nightmare, which for slme reason is extremely common nowadays.. would you feel safe speaking against your own government?
What does any of this has to do with digital ID? I'm using digit ID to access government services and sign documents, not to express my opinions online.
If you use it to access government services it's a thing, but using it to block the underaged from accessing social media it's a very different situation.
If you use credit cards to block underage from accessing social media it's also a different situation. Do you have a credit card?
Yes, but i dont use it to open up an online forum. The problem isn't the identification itself but when and why do i need to be identified. I thought this was clear.
This conversation is becoming silly. If you dont value your privacy online, thats your thing. I would drop internet usage to the minimum if i ever need to identify myself to use trivial shit like gaming or accessing social media.
And I don't use my digital ID to open online forums.
Sorry, i edited my comment on the way and didnt thought you would see it so quickly.
But we arent debating the existance of IDs but their implementation for accessing social media. Nobody would argue the usefulness of credit cards identifying who is doing the purchase, or as you said, using it to validate a signature.
The problem is the usage not the IDs themselves
I agree but the general attitude seems to be "digital ID bad!", without ever going into any details. People on lemmy are simply scared of digital IDs without understanding what those do.
You’ll have to use it to express your opinions online. That’s the problem, and the whole point of it. They government want to know exactly what every person says on the internet.
My country had digital ID for 20 years. You're saying they introduced it only to force age verification decades later? Because they want to do age verification using the EU proposed method, not using our digital IDs.
Your country clearly doesn’t have the type of digital ID that we’re talking about, does it?
What digital ID are you talking about? I have the type which I can import into my browser and use it to identify myself when accessing web sites.
Is it mandated that you use it on every social media site, like Lemmy or Reddit or YouTube?
No. Because digital IDs are not used only for that. So you, like everyone else, are not really against digital ID but against universal identification?
Universal identification via digital ID is what this is about. You’re trying to split hairs.
These laws are going to require you to verify your identity using a government issued digital id.
I'm not splitting hair. People are demonizing digital ID without understanding what those do. Like for many other things, there are good and bad use cases for digital ID. "Digital ID" is not a synonym for "universal identification". I'm just making sure people understand that.
That water you’re sitting in is getting warmer isn’t it?
Why does it have to be originally introduced with oppression in mind? Why not realize it provides a nice framework for it and use it instead? US toyed around with the idea of ID verification for anything that connects to internet. It is probably not going so smoothly. This could as well be a smaller experiment. We are talking about a goverment that jails eighty year olds for saying free palestine, not hard to imagine them wanting to do the same in the internet. It is crazy how far rabid zionist lobies can push goverments into oppressing their citizens.
Many things can be used for online identification and oppression, for example credit cards or cellphones. Why singe out digital ID? Are you going to fight against credit cards and cellphones as well or just digital ID?
Neither credit cards nor cellphones can not be used for the particular kind of oppression mentioned in my post definitely not en masse. They definitely can not be as efficient as ID verification for any kind of oppression. So cellphones and credit cards actually add some value to your life while NOT being very efficient oppression tools. ID verification won't add anything to your life while harboring capacity for being a very efficient oppression tool. Bad apps in cellphones can violate alot of aspects of your privacy but still not nearly as efficient as a goverment having direct access to online activity tied to a digital ID. So your examples aren't really relevant.
You're just scaremongering. You're equaling digital ID (which is a very useful tool) with universal online ID verification. Those are not the same things. You can have digital ID without mass ID verification (like I do) and you can have age and ID checks without digital IDs (like in UK). It's like being against law enforcement because police is used to create police states. Yeah, it's hard to create a police state without police but not every country with police is a police state.