Re: Nigeria launches national electronic ID cards

@Manu +10000


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On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> On 08/30/2014 05:00 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>
>> ""The card is not only a means of certifying your identity, but also
>> a personal database repository and payment card, all in your pocket,"
>>  President Jonathan said at the launch in the capital, Abuja. "
>>
>> You have a debit/credit/national identity card hybrid.
>>
>> No comment.
>>
>
> I've got a few comments. :)
>
> While this seems like a really horrible idea to data and identity
> privacy folks, it certainly makes me cringe, there are nations and
> cultures that don't think twice about their government tracking their
> every move. I think we should keep that in mind as we build the
> solution. The main purpose of this Web Payments work is to provide
> options for citizens, governments, and commercial enterprises.
>
> If some government and their banks want to track their citizens
> movements and expenditures, it would be better for them to use a world
> standard to do it (at least there are efficiencies gained / money not
> wasted there) than build something proprietary. As much as it makes my
> skin crawl to say that, this is more or less the deal with the devil
> that the HTTP Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) work had do. The people
> that develop software for the Web have a choice to either standardize
> stuff that governments are going to do in a proprietary way (like the
> Nigerian debit/credit/identity card, or continue to keep those functions
> proprietary (thus indirectly contributing to wasted effort and bad
> designs the world over).
>
> Strong governments with strong, functioning democracies would hopefully
> fight this type of violation of privacy. For those
> governments/corporation initiatives, they should be able to use the same
> set of standards as the non-privacy protecting governments. I think
> we'll be more successful enabling choice rather than mandating solutions
> based on our particular idealism.
>
> If we are successful, the US, EU, Nigeria, China, Hong Kong, and
> Singapore would use the same base financial Web standards with differing
> values on the privacy/tracking/market-based dials.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
> http://blog.meritora.com/launch/
>
>