Digital Identification in a Brave New World

Discerning What Is Best with Dr Rex M Rogers

Digital Identification, or Digital ID, is an assemblage of online personally identifying information extracted from our digital footprint - all our activity and actions online - or specifically inputted to create our unique ID. It sounds good, and in many applications it is good, reducing paperwork, speeding health records or purchases, etc. But our Digital ID is also subject to governments, corporations, and bad actors who want access for purposes of control, manipulation, or crime. And our Digital ID is only part of the story, for we now live in a mass surveillance society wherein we are being recorded on CCTV cameras nearly every time we visit a public space. Add this to biometric technology like facial recognition, geo-location technology, and growing digital financial networks and we are easily now at risk of enormous threats to basic human rights and freedoms. It's happening in China as we write where the authoritarian government is adding thousands more cameras in Chinese cities and creating a "social credit system" that functions like merits/demerits in grade school, allowing government to track and trace then intervene or punish or limit at will. Digital Identification may be good, but hit comes with a host of caveats for those who use it in a free society. For more Christian commentary, check my website at rexmrogers.com.