I am not trying to poo-poo our generation’s Winston Churchill. I’m really not. He is trying to save his nation and for that he deserves our great admiration and support. But, let’s not get too far down that path.
At the dawn of Covid, the Ukrainian government, following the lead of EU goals, adopted their own electronic papers. Volodymyr Zelensky put in place a “Social Credit Application combining Universal Basic Income (UBI), a Digital Identity & (sic) a Vaccine Passport all within their Diia app”
It’s no longer, Show me your papers!, it’s Show me your iPhone!.
In Ukraine, an air of social credit with the Diia app
By Alban Martin
March 16 2022
If the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has put these two countries at the forefront of the international scene, we have learned that the second city is a digital champion. In a logic of digitizing and centralizing everything, the government launched in 2020 an application called Diia that brings together identity cards, passports, permits, vaccination records, registrations, insurance, health reimbursements, social benefits, and more. A model that until now was only known in China with the famous social credit.
Ukraine is the champion of digital identity with the Diia app.
This was mentioned for a long time, then precipitated by the COVID crisis, governments want to move towards a digitization of everyday life by bringing together almost all telephone services. While the European Union announced a test to digitize the vaccination record (see official PDF), wallet and identities in 2018, Ukraine was very quick to react with a Diia application deployed by the government almost two years ago. Since then, the platform has continued to evolve.
Ukrainians can download Diia and store a lot of official information as mentioned above, with the aim of being able to easily carry out most of the administrative procedures ranging from the payment of his taxes to the renewal of identity documents, the payment of his fines or the recovery of his social benefits. In all, nearly 50 services can be reached since the application and 9 official documents have the same value as their paper counterparts. Eventually, it will soon be impossible to make a formal request. Moreover, with COVID-19, the government even announced that the payment of benefits conditional on the presence of a vaccination certificate. In addition, a program soberly named "money for vaccines" and launched by Volodimir Zelensky last year, aimed to "encourage people to get vaccinated against Covid-19 and to support the sectors of the economy that have suffered the most from quarantine restrictions". From the age of 14, each person with a complete vaccination schedule in the application received 1000 hryvnia (about 30 euros). When the real catches up with Orwell...
Ukraine therefore posed as the champion of digitalization before the war broke out at the end of February. At the beginning of 2021, it already claimed more than 4.5 million active users. But looking more closely at what is currently being done, it turns out that Poland has a mobile application similar to that of Ukraine, which was launched at the end of 2019. This Polish app displays seven digital documents and allows users to identify themselves with a digital identity card in places where a paper passport is not legally required.
In the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, citizens can use ePassports at airports for check-in and security screening. This will soon happen in the USA thanks to Apple Wallet. In China, citizens have access to virtual identity cards integrated into a mobile application. Users can use it to identify themselves when they register in a hotel or to benefit from certain government services, with outright a point system that allows them to have additional rights in case of "good conduct". In Estonia, 70% of the population uses digital identity cards, while 99% of public services are available online.
What do you think of this transition to all-digital? Practical or worrying?
END ARTICLE
(Translated from French via Safari translator)
When one thinks about it, it would be extremely convenient to have everything you could possibly need stored in your mobil phone even though, being so old that I had to use a corded telephone—a rotary dial one at that—connected to a real landline, I have an extremely difficult time lining up my camera function to read a QR code. I truly resisted messing with it until all the restaurants I dined in, post-Covid, required a QR code to upload their menu. I’m just too shaky with the camera so I lost weight—kidding.
But when one thinks about it further, this is a terrifying place to go. Do you want entrance to public transit? Got to show your QR. Maybe your local government wants to confine people’s travel because of Climate Change! so if you reached your carbon footprint threshold for the week, you’re shut down—no heading downtown to meet friends for dinner. Of course you won’t be able to take an EV Lyft or Uber for the same reason.
Maybe you go grocery shopping but you’re deemed a bit on the chunky side. When you go to check out you won’t be allowed to buy Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies. Meet a friend for a beer? Sorry, you bought a six-pack of Bud last night so you reached your possible alcohol intake for the week.
It’s always the little things.
But what if you try to buy a copy of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn off Amazon? Sorry, that’s considered racist. Purchase denied.
So, in a week’s time, you exceeded your carbon footprint, you tried to buy a Little Debbie, you may have drank too much, and you self-identified as a racist. Maybe you need a little down time to reassess your life’s choices. Because you need a week of in-home reflection, when you try to leave your apartment, your lock won’t work. They also fine you ten credits from your Universal Basic Income account. Hopefully you’ll have a few Little Debbie’s hidden under your bed otherwise you will lose enough weight in a week’s time to at least, after the fine, buy some celery and cottage cheese. Maybe you’ll have enough carbon credits to visit mom in the suburbs. Probably not. Mom, because she raised you, was determined to be subversive and she’s now reassessing her life’s choices by working in the Budweiser factory, surrounded by barbed wire, just down the street from your old family home.
And what happens if you forgot to charge your phone?