Author: wwducat

Uhh.

Yeah, no…

I’m not interested. In the year that I’ve had the California digital ID I’ve not had one single situation that it was useful. 

Nada, Zero, None.

Aside from the slow rollout of digital ID on a state level, it appears there’s an even slower adoption rate among vendors. I wan’t expecting it to be used in every liquor store or anything.

But it would be really useful in medical situations, where the paradigm is you hand your ID to some medical clerk who then makes a photo copy of your physical ID then stick that in a file someplace. Although now medical providers want you ro scan your ID and upload it to them yearly.

Or in situations like a cellular provider who wants you to scan and upload your ID to their website.

You’d think that at least in those situations, the security aspects would be obvious and quickly adopted. 

There is the capacity for their website to get the information directly from your phone in a secure tokenized format that only provides the necessary information for their purposes and nothing else.

In the glitch I had with my watch, I lost the California ID that could be presented via the watch. California apparently has no provision to correct that. Instead they keep directing me to a verification web site page that’s not complete. The page says something like “We’re working to get this page operational please check back later.”

I just deleted the mobile license from my watch, because the notification to go to a dead California web page appearing 2 or 3 times a day annoyed me.

The ID is still available on my phone for what it’s worth but since it’s a pointless bit of data, I’m seriously considering deleting it.

Why bother?

Now you can put your passport information in your phone too. But that information is only useful at few TSA checkpoints at scattered airports across the nation. It can’t be used at border checkpoints to enter the country.

So really what good is it?

It’s an interesting little novelty widget, nothing more.

Digital ID has so much potential. It’s a pity it’s not received enough adoption to make it worthwhile.

I fully acknowledge the darker side of digital ID. One only need look at China to understand the dystopian down side.

I appreciate the idealism of digital ID. I’d be very excited if it was widely used in voting, medicine, medical insurance, and as we have recently come to understand EBT/Snap welfare benefits. I think that it could make a hell of a dent in fraud. With the biometric aspect it’s a no brainer in these situations.

However, it’s pretty obvious that the political party that consistently votes against any form of ID being required to access these services would fight tooth and nail against it. They’d make the case that not all the “Poor” have access to phones with the capability. Just as they now say not all the “Poor” have the intellectual ability to get an ID. 

Even though, those people, that party, claims are intellectually deficient, typically have the latest and greatest phone technology which they use constantly to post their TicTok and instagram videos of criminal behavior including threats, or looting & rioting.

It should be noted that in order to get those phones and phone service, they have to provide ID. That’s interesting too because it was that Political Party that voted for IDs to be required if someone chose to purchase a phone with a prepaid plan. Also known as a “Burner” phone.

I’ve come to suspect that the Digital ID thing will slowly fade away at least in this country.

I think this for a number of reasons:

1) There are a lot of people that do not trust our government.
2) I think the digital ID thing is seen as an impediment to getting a new phone. Do you have to re-register the ID’s with the issuing authority every time you change devices? [You don’t as a rule, but the issuing authorities would love that for tracking purposes]
3) Without wide acceptance and use on the part of vendors it’s a nothing burger.
4) Since even Law Enforcement isn’t using the system, requiring the user to carry the physical ID what’s the point?
5) Unless you travel weekly for business you’ll never encounter any situation that the digital ID is used at all. Since even the TSA can’t guarantee that their kiosks are operational at an airport on any given day, a physical ID is still necessary.
6) China’s example of social credit scores, where they use digital ID to absolutely destroy individuals because they said or did something the Chinese government didn’t like.
7) The UK is implementing digital ID and following China’s lead. The people in the UK, while generally compliant to their government’s commands have begun to fight because they see that misuse of the ID abridges their freedoms. The UK is even trying to implement digital IDs for visitors. Though they seem to have a rather large blind spot when it comes to “Asylum Seekers”.
8) There’s the religious overtone about everyone having “The Mark” and being unable to buy or sell unless one has “The Mark”. (As China has demonstrated.)
9) There’s the conspiracy theorist angle that encompasses all of the above and suggests compliance is enslavement. One could argue that we’re already enslaved, but digital IDs simply make the fact of enslavement “In your face”.

For someone like myself who genuinely believed that all the technology I helped to create would benefit humanity this is a depressing turn of events.

The potential for good, is so appealing. Back in my youth, I naively thought that people would choose good over the dark side. “History be damned,” I thought. “Surely we’d learned from our mistakes and wouldn’t choose that dark path again.“

As I said, I was idealistic and naive. 

I’m even doubting that I’ll renew my passport when it’s due. There’s no place I want to go to visit anymore. That could change, and I have time.

If however, I chose to expatriate I’d not need a passport. All I need do is illegally enter another county claiming political, or economic asylum, with no ID. That seems to be all the rage these days. One need only look at the piles of ID’s floating in the Mediterranean, or stacked next to the Rio Grande.

For someone like myself, who’s actively trying to reduce my digital footprint and minimize my financial entanglements, digital ID has become a non-starter. I want to fade away, drop off the grid and live free.

The way we’re hooked into the system, has in the past week been underscored by my health insurance provider. I used an app (of course) to try to renew a 90 day prescription. Several hours later the app informed me that the prescription was delayed. Several hours after that, I got a call from the insurance provider.

Stupidly, I answered the call, thinking there was some issue on their part about the prescription. I’d just pulled a rare, hot lunch out of the toaster oven and thought the call would resolve the prescription problem and I’d go on with the rest of my day.

Instead what I got was some girl from some organization that was loosely associated with my insurance provider being quite insistent that I needed to set an appointment with someone else to answer questions for the insurance provider.

I explained that I was just sitting down to lunch and wasn’t interested. I asked if my answering questions was mandatory. She was unable to clearly tell me that, nor was she able to tell me what kinds of questions I needed to answer. Nope! She was badgering and demanding about my setting some appointment with a nurse practitioner, wherein there would be a video conference.

FUCK!

I just wanted to eat my now rapidly cooling meal in peace. On and on, circle within circle this girl annoyed me until I finally said, “FINE! Just set the damn appointment! I don’t give a shit when, just do it.”

40 minutes later I finally hung up the fucking phone. I gave the now cold, meal to the dog because I was so pissed off at that point I didn’t feel like eating.

(Note to self… Next time don’t answer or when the annoyance level reaches “pissed off” just hang up.)

Within minutes, my phone was blowing up with multiple text messages asking how I felt about that phone call, confirming the appointment, and telling me that there was going to be other confirming phone calls, about the appointment, and that I must go to their web site to verify that my technology would accommodate their video conferencing standard.

I don’t take orders or demands very well. I never have. The more insistent or demanding someone is, the less likely I’m going to comply. This is particularly true if I see no direct benefit to me.

In this instance I don’t see any direct benefit and have come to believe this whole thing is nothing more that these folks finding a way to bill for services that I not only did not ask for, and that I don’t want.

The other possibility is that the insurance provider is attempting to get information about my health records that they didn’t get from the useless doctor I saw a month or so ago. I’m wondering if they’re wanting to plug my data into some actuarial table for probability analysis to figure out my risk to them, so they can up the billing or demand that I submit to the merry go round of tests, more tests, and yet more tests, then follow up appointments, all of which are designed to drag me into the medical industrial complex so that I spend my retirement years running like a hamster on a wheel for their benefit, not mine.

Last night I got a call from the nurse practitioner reminding me of an appointment today. I thought… why don’t you just ask your questions now lady? Why are you wasting your time and mine? You obviously have time to call me now, why wait till tomorrow?

I know what it’s all about. It’s about racking up check marks in some form on some computer that all translate to billing somehow.

I’ll play along tonight when she calls and I’m not likely to be particularly cooperative or compliant. 

The nurse practitioner was barking orders at me during the confirmation call.

Then I got another two text messages, along with a demand that I sign into their conferencing system 10 minutes prior to the scheduled time.

Uh excuse me? When did I start working for them?

All of this is related to the complexities of systems. Digital ID simply takes a previously working simple system and makes it more difficult to manage. 

Imagine what happens when every single aspect of our lives are bounded by mandatory compliance and demands in service to any corporation or government entity that has access to our information.

How long until everyone must provide hours of their day, (translating to hours of their lives,) dedicated to nothing more than managing who, how, and what, has access to their lives. Imagine a situation wherein any misstep could mean that you don’t get something you need whether you’ve paid for it or not.

This insurance thing is one single aspect. Multiply it by 10 services, all attached to a digital ID and you’ve probably increased the points of failure by 1000.

I still don’t know what the status of my prescription is, and am researching safe ways to get off the drug entirely.

It’s not that I’m not interested in my health. It’s that I have zero trust in government, healthcare, or the common decency of people anymore.

That being said, I see no reason to participate in digital IDs. With the intrusive nature of text messages, cell phones, email, and all the rest of the modern world. I’m wondering if I can ween myself off technology entirely.

I rather like the concept put forward in the Jack Reacher series of books. In those, the main character has, his paper ID, a pension account he accesses via Western Union, and is not tied to any place or system.

He lives a simple unencumbered unconnected life.

That sounds really nice.

Now I’m off to deal with mandatory licensing for the dog, then updating payment methods on accounts for services, then I’ll spend some time on the phone with Apple to sort out some other screwups on my phone created by one of their software updates. Then I’ll have to make sure at least one of my devices has a full charge to be able to join this dumb shit conference call later today. [Honestly, I kind of liked it better when I had no health insurance it was one less thing to deal with.]

But all of this “Only takes a few minutes…”

Minutes that I’ll never get back!

See how that works?