HTML is not a programming language

It’ll take so long before you can even leave your physical ID at home and count on everyone accepting your digital one. And it may never happen that people stop accepting your physical one.

It’s so people can trial having digital IDs. Some TSA and others can scan the new IDs, but not everyone can. So in the meantime, you have to carry your physical one too.

People are pointing out potential negatives, but this has some good possibilities for privacy too. If you show your ID at the liquor store, there’s no need for the clerk to know your name or address. The scanner can just verify your age.

I mean, you’re right. We exist in a bubble. The average person is not very tech literate. I would never not E2EE my backups, but the majority of the public don’t care. It matters far more that they can recover their data if they forget their password.

I love hating on big tech, but in this instance, making E2EE the default may make people very angry when they cant just reset their password when they forget it. I’m just happy the option exists where I can toggle it on.

Hopefully one day the public will care enough about security and privacy. And hopefully the public will be using password managers so they never lose their encrypted data. Until that day, encryption kind of has to be opt-in for the general public and available for people who have basic tech skills.

It is. I hate Meta, but this isn’t them. This appears on any site that isn’t loading properly.

This is how it’ll happen. Opt in. They’ll charge more by default and then you can share your safe driving with them to lower your premium. It’s often how it currently works with odometer readings, except not through a smart car, just a quick dash reading.

Imagine I keep a log of everyone I encounter… their race, hair colour, eye colour, glasses shape, accent, gender, fingernail length, ear lobe shape, everything. I would probably encounter the same people every so often, and I would be able to recognize them from my log.

Now imagine that one of them started dying their hair and putting in coloured contact lenses, and they changed it up every day. I may be able to collect all of the details about them. They’re very unique. But… I couldn’t match them against anyone in my log, even though I’ve seen them multiple times.

Having a unique browser fingerprint is perfectly fine if it constantly changes. They can collect all of those details about you, but if you keep changing key details, they won’t be able to recognize you.

iOS 17 Safari (especially with enhanced fingerprint protection on) is really good at fingerprint protection. It rotates a few data points like canvas ID so that it makes you look like a new fingerprint each time.

Fingerprint analyzers can find out lots about your fingerprint that way, but if your fingerprint keeps changing, it becomes difficult to identify you. Unique fingerprints don’t mean anything if your fingerprint keeps changing.

So don’t agree to the terms of service? This could count as consent.