German citizen here. So why is an implementation going forward when you already know it will not serve all citizens? Why are we not refusing to implement this until we know we can make it work on all devices?

Personally I recently switched from an AOSP based android without Google Play to Ubuntu Touch. In the future with better hardware support I will probably switch to postmarketOS.

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gmueckl 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You have the totally wrong expectations here. Some service that requires citizens to buy and bring their own devices in order to use a service will by definition always be exclusive. Whining about lacking compatibility with some niche sbowflake devices is just inappropriate in this context. The only solutiin is to require an actually convenient fallback for those otherwise excluded from that service.

The limited selection of attestation providers can be criticized for many other reasons, though.

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dabber21 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

also German here, we have to get rid of the 100% perfection at launch expectation its crippling this country

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ramblerman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Taxpayer money project being tied to a dependency on Apple google is 100% counter what that money should be used for.

You are copy pasting a “correct” argument against eu bureaucracy in the absolute wrong space

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conception 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But things not in the launch can easily be deprioritized as budget issues indefinitely. “Oh why spend the money adding support for just a few people??” will be the line moving forward.

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charcircuit 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

It would be cheaper to just buy all of the outliers a bottom of the barrel Android phone for them to use with the tax money.

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fsflover 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

And force them into the Google surveillance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

	▲	charcircuit 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Collecting telemetry is not the same thing as surveillance. Using such vocabulary to describe what a phone does is both misleading and manipulating, playing into the angle of scaremongering people who do not want to be survived.

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josefx an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A 10% goal would be a good first step. Now excuse me while I read some tea leaves to find out if my trains will be on time tomorrow ( spoiler: they wont).

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ExoticPearTree 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why are we not refusing to implement this until we know we can make it work on all devices?

Simply put: this will never happen. Way too many devices implementations to make this a reality.

	▲	fsflover 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's just a matter of creating a web app.

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miki123211 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do all German hospitals serve vegan food?

If you were averse to carrots (without any health restrictions on eating them), would every government institution in Germany be required to serve you carrot-free food?

If not, why should they be forced to accommodate every smartphone brand in existence, even if there's only 3 people in Germany using it? THe list has to end somewhere.

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RobotToaster 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Do all German hospitals serve vegan food?

Can't speak for Germany, but they do in the UK. It would be illegal discrimination against a belief for them not to.

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vovavili 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Subsidizing expensive tastes doesn't strike me as discriminatory.

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conception an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Lol at eating just plants as being expensive. You do know where animals that are eaten get their food right?

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RobotToaster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Would you say the same if they refused to serve kosher/halal meals for Muslim/Jewish patients?

UK law protects some philosophical beliefs equally to religions. (what qualifies is a bit of a mess as it's all case law)

(On a practical note, I imagine it's easier for hospitals to just serve vegan food for anyone who is vegetarian/Muslim/Jewish rather than have specific kosher/halal meals)

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sotix 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Vegetables, legumes, nuts, and grains are not expensive, and veganism is a protected class in the UK.

	▲	plagiarist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah but when you're mad at a nation not force-feeding meat to vegans you have to come up with some reason why the vegans are bad.

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aziaziazi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Actually the subsidies mostly go to diary farming. Vegan food is cheap to produce but mostly not subsidised. This, plus the (no) economy of scale makes the shelf prices sometimes slightly higher, eg soy milk vs defatted milk.

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b112 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

While the example your provide is reasonable fair, the comparison is not.

For it to be fair comparison, the carrots would have to be grown by a foreign company, known for using unsafe growing practices, causing contamination. Eg, poison carrots. This same company would have to be under the control of a very hostile, very actively aggressive and threatening nation.

Such as one currently threatening to annex allies, among other things.

With the US literally tapping and spying on heads of foreign states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Parliamentary_Committee...

and there being lots of ways to spy, such as push notifications:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...

Only insane people would objectively decide to use Google or Apple anything for any form of ID. Those platforms should literally be outlawed. Any use of push notifications or identity attention should be looked at as utter fantasy.

Here's a secret for you. There really isn't any urgent requirement to have an electronic identification method. It can wait. Supporting legislation can be passed first. There are lots of ways to do so.

For example, the entire EU could pass legislation stating that all cell phones have open source code available, including all binary blobs for drivers. And that all phones are unlockable, and that (for example) the phone has a version of the rom you can download without any Google services.

(If Apple isn't able to compete here, well... too bad)

The phones would not be legal to sell, unless the open source firmware was compiled in front of regulators. The point of this is another pet-peeve of mine, it would allow people to support their own phones, for that source code would be released the day that phone was no longer supported.

And yes, it's trivial to have open source firmware blobs. There just isn't a market for it. Pass a law, and sellers of SoC and other ICs will capitulate, or maybe more punitive laws will be passed against them. As someone once said, yes companies can have a lot of sway.

But governments have police, courts, and armies.

Right now, Android and Apple devices are a literal arm of the US government's spying apparatus, even if those two companies actively work against it.

Do not trust Google Play. Do not trust Firebase. Do not trust Google. At all.

Are Germans just too trusting? I remember 15 years ago, when nuclear power plants were closing, concerns were raised about the reliance on Russian natural gas. These were waved away. Russia? What's wrong with Russia! They're almost allies, they're capitalists now!

Don't do this again.

Do NOT trust Google. Don't. Don't make it a core part of any identity management.

Imagine, needing an active Google account to even bank! Or to file your taxes, or even to prove who you are!? Google cancels accounts with no recourse, no reason why, won't help anyone, and this is to be the core of identity management for Germany?

The average person won't even be able to install any German Government designed apps, unless they are on the Play store! Are you going to teach Grandma how to use ADB to install an app? Without an active Google Account, will you even be able to use push notifications?

Why would a government even allow ID to be blocked by the requirement that a company with terrible, horrible, inane customer service, which just kills accounts without recourse, be a gatekeeper?

No Google account, no ID! Wha!?

It's literally not sane.

	▲	LexGray 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think it falls under the article yesterday about male German citizens having restrictions on their travel. Electronic ID is a step toward “papers please”. Germany at least seems to feel international war is only a few steps away and from how militant the Chinese and Russians have been treating their “territory” I am not sure it is a bad call. America has likewise turned bad preferring violence over dialogue and loves tracking “hostile influences on the American way of life”. Those influences being anyone who would call out the toxic culprits making America into a cesspit. Tying to Apple and Google? It is a terrible idea. Both are prone to freeze devices for financial or social issues. However, a fix I would accept is to force the device makers to support multiple accounts out of box on every device to keep separate what the corporations have proven time and again they cannot be trusted to combine. Also for those companies to be forced to make a cheap credit card sized device which must be held to power on for the few that truly hate the ecosystems.

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like_any_other an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it will not serve all citizens

This is an understatement. Better phrasing would be "when it allows two unaccountable foreign companies to lock citizens out of the digital market".

There are plenty of horror stories of tech giants frivolously banning people. We shouldn't be adding state support to that. I don't want to lose access to digital banking because of some deliberately vague "community guidelines" violation, or because I got mass-reported to some "e-safety" provider that both Apple and Google outsource to.

Sibling comments see this as a good solution, just not a perfect one. I see it as making a bad problem worse.

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dark-star 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

because then it will never get done. There are still people using old Nokia phones, for those there will never be a solution.

The usual 80/20 rule applies here as well.

And if you really are a German citizen, you know how slow the wheels of government already turn in Germany, I assume next week you would be the one complaining that "Germany is so far behind" and that "other countries are so much faster at implementing stuff" :)

	▲	haagch 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nah, I'm that one idiot who uses alternative open software and just accepts when services aren't offered to me. The older I get, the easier it feels to not give a fuck anymore. Can't buy any single fare public transport tickets online here in Stuttgart? Sure, I'll use the DeutschlandTicket NFC card. Can't view the EPA? Fine then I don't. Can't pay with Wero? Fine, I don't actually need to use shops that don't offer SEPA Vorkasse or Lastschrift (only without a dodgy "identity verification" fintech startup of course.
	▲	sippeangelo 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Then maybe it shouldn't be done? What??
	▲	abc123abc123 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yeah, let's burn the witches who care about privacy! Jokes aside, in a democracy, the systems must be designed so that everyone can participate. We manage to do it with voting, with income tax declaration, but for some strange reason, with ID we want to achieve 1984 nirvana, and crush the voices who tell us that the surveilance society we are building is just setting us up for the next Hitler.
	▲	jijijijij 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> There are still people using old Nokia phones No one wants support for toasters and washing machines. We're talking general purpose compute hardware. TCP is also supported on all these devices. Quite frankly, it's probably easier to implement, if you are not fighting a locked-down OS like iOS.

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p2detar 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do we have stats how many germans use something else than Google Android, Samsung Knox or Apple? I recon it should be less than 1% which quite honestly is in fact „all“ citizens.

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elric 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, let's just arbitrarily exclude ~1million people because they're not running the government's preferred American spyware.

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ryandrake an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is a very, VERY stereotypical Tech Product Manager viewpoint: "N% of users are hard to support edge cases, so we should exclude them." You see this justification everywhere in business. "We'll drop support for [old OS] once it gets to 1% of our user base." "Only 1% of our users have non-Latin characters in their usernames so it's OK to not support that." "1% of our users are on 3G or slower Internet connections, so we don't have to consider them in our performance metrics."

It's a pragmatic, profit-oriented point of view, but not one that makes sense when your mission is to be inclusive of everyone.

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p2detar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is an unfair and a straw man argument, is it not? Are you also unhappy that in a democracy the 51% choose how the other 49% are going to be governed?

Why device attestation is required is quite well explained by this github comment [0]. I am in the industry and I agree fully with it, because it is a fact a problem for most smart phone users in terms of security.

0 - https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...

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Hackbraten 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think your analogy is flawed. I can be part of the losing 49% and still be entitled to receive the same services as the 51%, whereas people who chose a privacy-oriented OS are essentially going to be excluded from essential governmental services. That's a whole different kind of thing.

I'm not going to replace my 1200 EUR smartphone with a device that forces me to have an account with Apple or Google. I've been issued a German identity card, which is its own computer that includes a digital identity already. I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need. They should just stop excluding me already.

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p2detar an hour ago | parent [-]

> privacy-oriented OS

Well, in all seriousness what examples could you give me here in terms of device hardware attestation? Even GrapheneOS does use Google root certificates to attest your device. There is indeed an option for EUDI to keep a list of keys and I bet this is probably the way they are going to go for Android in the future. We shouldn't forget this is still in the planing phase.

> to have an account with Apple or Google.

True for Google, not true for Apple. Device attestation on iOS does not require you to have an iCloud account or sign into some Apple services. It works entirely using device hardware ids.

> I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need.

Nope. This is eID and verifies your identity, it does not attest the security of your hardware. These are two different problems we talk about here.

	▲	fsflover 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> in all seriousness what examples could you give me here in terms of device hardware attestation? My Librem 5 runs an FSF-endorsed OS and has a smartcard. > True for Google, not true for Apple. Device attestation on iOS does not require you to have an iCloud account or sign into some Apple services. This is extremely misleading. Even if true, you must have an account in order to install any app on an iPhone.

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shakna 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If it requires a Google or Apple account, then it also requires those companies never cease an account, either. Or vulnerable people will be harmed.

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type0 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In fact „all“ citizens who are willing to be surveilled by Google and Apple, unless German government provides each citizen with similar eID hardware there won't be any digital equality any time soon. Maybe they should pay to some subsidiary company of IBM (like RedHat) to do this, they already have such a good track record of storing nationality on their machines /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag#Holocaust