I think the fear many people have is that digital ID will be required for non-government services as well. I can easily see that happen in the USA and Switzerland is the kind of weird that may also let that sort of thing happen.

With things like age verification becoming mandatory just about everywhere and actual privacy-conscious digital age verification being very difficult, there's definitely a risk towards abuse and badly designed authorization mechanisms (although the EU's open source backend and frontends should make it easy for other countries if they do actually care about privacy).

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nullfield 2 days ago | parent [-]

The kinds of things you want here, and that I think we all do, are hard.

Yes, ideally a trusted intermediary would do something like… read your digital ID (which stiLL doesn’t guarantee it’s you providing it, up to a point), examine a birthdate, and sign an attestation to a liquor store that “this user is 21 or older” without you ever having to fork over your name, address, or biometric details.

The will to enforce such measures, at least in the US, seems low.

	▲	jeroenhd a day ago \| parent [-]
		This is why the EU is going the app route. You load your ID into an app, and can review on-the-fly what data you're sharing (including a simple "older than 18" token to buy liquor). The app also allows keeping a log of who requested what data, so if you find out in hindsight that your grocery store requested your full name illegally, you can report them. Enforcement chances in the US, maybe outside of California, do seem low, but at least the "we cannot do it" argument is off the table when the EU has a ready-to-deploy suite on Github for anyone to access. If you don't like the EU, the Yivi (previously IRMA) project implements pretty much the same ecosystem, but in a slightly different way.