You have plenty of government id's in the US as well. Driver licenses, tax number, birth certificates ...
I think often people mess up the subjects of privacy, freedom and a government provided id. You can have privacy and freedom even if you have a government issued id. And you can have your privacy and freedom taken away from you without the government giving you standardized way of proving your id.
You can’t have privacy if everyone uses the government as an SSO.
People might be more amenable if SSO wasn’t implemented as these stupid OIDC flows where the govt gets to know every time you login to your bank and what IP you’re using, etc.
> You can’t have privacy if everyone uses the government as an SSO.
Why not? Anonymous cryptographic attestation methods (e.g. of only the fact that you are over 18 years old, that you are a permanent resident etc.) exist.
But you can if you live in a well functioning democratic society - remember the alternative is not no id but privatized for profit identity providers like Google and Facebook.
Well functioning democratic society is and idea that US explicitly rejects, because democratic society can point a finger at you and that doesn't feel nice.
A well functioning democratic society is one of the valid states before an autocratic regime. The Nazi party was elected.
Apart from regime changes, being a functional democratic society doesn’t protect you from technical incompetence nor does it limit the ability for people with access to the DB from abusing it.
I think often people mess up the subjects of privacy, freedom and a government provided id. You can have privacy and freedom even if you have a government issued id. And you can have your privacy and freedom taken away from you without the government giving you standardized way of proving your id.