The difference being that this new "digital identity wallet" will be required if you want to enter a shop, board a city bus, or drop a letter in a mailbox.
My initial comment pertained to the weasel-words "can be used" appearing in the excerpt - and that they will undoubtedly morph into "must be used" faster than you can imagine.
Your sarcastic comments about medical licenses and such suggests to me that you are in favor of ever-greater govt. intrusion into our daily lives. Am I right?
Regards,
I’m neither in favorof it nor against it.
The real power these days rests in the hands of whoever decides what’s mandatory or not.
Banks would abuse online banking to the Nth degree, if Federal Government regs didn’t bind them.
The FDA medicine regulations would not exist had it not been for decades of total market abuse by a Wild West, unregulated, unqualified, or even just plain negligent, private enterprise chancers leading to scandals like thalidomide.
In the past, regulatory focus has been on what the individual can or can’t do. That is wrong.
It’s not the private citizen that needs to be the focus of regulatory constraints - it’s overpowered commercial interests and lobbies
market distortion by serial abusers, organized crime, the “too big to fail” industries that are propped up by an endless supply of state subsidies...
The private citizen can’t expect that regulation, which ultimately exists to benefit the consumer and constrain criminal enterprise, to exist in a vacuum.
This is a profound difference to everything that’s happened before in the digital age. But it needs a revisitation of civic responsibility and the relationship between the individual, the community, the state and the private sector.
There are 70 million people in Britain and if 35 million of them took an active interest in cleaning up their doorsteps and communities the police could focus on the really important stuff instead of getting bogged down by trivial neighborhood disputes and people getting offended by today’s bad words. (That is the essence of Thatcherism).
So what does that look like in the identity context?
Imagine you had a locked briefcase, handcuffed to your arm, with all your secrets in it and only you could open it. Nothing short of a subpoena with a defined reason and approved justification could compel you to share any content of the briefcase against your will.
The digital wallet is basically just that, but in cyberspace. It can be a state issued wallet or a company wallet or a health provider’s wallet, but any which way you see it, it’s important you understand it’s your wallet not theirs.
The question is, under what circumstances would you accept ANYONE accessing / modifying your wallet(s) without your explicit consent... If you couch that question only in terms of state actors you are completely missing the point.