What were once conspiracy theories are now headlines.
From naked capitalism, April 26:
As the World Bank drives the implementation of digital ID programs across the Global South, including in Nigeria, its fellow Bretton Woods institution, the IMF, is doing exactly the same for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
“I would never want to get a digital ID.”
Those are the words of Ann Cavoukian, who served three terms as privacy commissioner for the Canadian territory of Ontario (1997-2014) and is renowned for pioneering the concept of privacy by design, which takes privacy into account throughout system engineering processes. She was also an advisor on Sidewalk Labs, Google’s pet project to transform the Toronto’s Quayside development into a “new type of smart city,” whose plans to collect and share data on local citizens ended up sparking a public backlash. Cavoukian resigned from her advisory role in 2018 over privacy concerns and the project was eventually scrapped in 2020.
Cavoukian now serves as executive director of the Global Privacy and Security by Design Centre. A recent article in the Toronto Sun cited her fears that digital ID systems will fall victim to identity theft and online accessing of data by unauthorized third parties. These are just two of the many concerns the digital ID programs rapidly being rolled out around the world throw up. Another is their potential to exclude people — particularly those already on the margins — from being able to participate in the economy or society.
Nigeria’s government, determined to speed up public adoption of its mandatory digital ID, just gave one example of how this could happen. To encourage (to put it kindly) citizens to get with its ID program, it has barred anyone who isn’t registered in the national digital identity database from being able to make outgoing calls from their mobile phones. The move has affected some 73 million people, according to a Thomson Reuters article. That is roughly a third of the West African nation’s just over 200 million inhabitants....
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