Bill Gates recently suggested he wants online speech to be shaped to curb misinformation by ensuring people are properly identified online, which would require digital IDs.
“You see it every day now in China. They have a digital identity that allows them to do anything, really anything, online. Banking, commerce, work, everything is tied to a single online identity that is issued to them by the government. And if the government thinks you've said something wrong or wants to revoke that digital identity, there's nothing you can do,” Peter Guetl, editor in chief of BlazeNews' Return & Frontier magazine, told “BlazeNews Tonight”'s Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson.
Peterson is understandably concerned.
“How do we stop this?” he asked Guilletl, adding, “And before we get there, don't we already have some kind of digital identity?”
“We can all be tracked, followed and possibly punished if any powerful organisation wishes,” he added.
“Yes, it certainly exists,” Gietl responded, noting that credit card companies are building digital identity structures behind the scenes. “They don't yet have the ability or the will to deploy it in a way that says, 'We're going to censor people and attach this identity to everything they do on the internet.'”
“And that's what's disturbing about what Gates is advocating. He's talking about being tied to a single ID to use the internet, but that means it will be much easier to track and control people, even though you can track and generally know what they're doing online,” he added.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a major driving force behind digital ID, and is also introducing it in Africa as a digital ID pass.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the really scary stuff is tested in Africa because they know the media doesn't report on these things very often, so it's a great way to see how it works in society,” Gietl explains.
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