The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, has just ended. The theme of the five-day event, “Working Together, Restoring Trust,” was both vague and troubling, in equal measures.
Remember, this is the WEF we are discussing here, an international organization actively pushing “The Great Reset.” The theme could just as easily have read: “Suffering Together, Restoring Compliance.”
Among the many issues discussed, members focused on the spread of misinformation and disinformation. How, they asked, can the proliferation of harmful content be combatted? It’s easy, they answered, how about introducing digital IDs?
The WEF recently rolled out the Global Coalition for Digital Safety, an initiative designed to “accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful content online.” In an effort to remedy the scourge of malicious material, the WEF has brought together a “diverse group of leaders who are well placed to exchange best practices for new online safety regulation and help millions of connected citizens improve digital media literacy.”
These “diverse leaders” include head executives at the likes of Google, Microsoft, Interpol, and a number of government ministers. Another coalition member is Yoti, a company that strives to make the internet a safer place. How so? Through the use of digital IDs.
The dangers posed by digital IDs cannot be emphasized enough. As the researcher Brett Solomon—a man “who has tracked the advantages and perils of technology for human rights” for well over a decade—previously noted, the mass rollout of digital IDs “poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.”
As we rush “headlong into a future where new technologies will converge to make this risk much more severe,” we must prepare ourselves for the dawn of “near-perfect facial recognition technology and other identifiers, from the human gait to breath to iris,” according to Solomon.
According to the tech researcher, biometric databases of the not-too-distant future will be centralized in nature. Opaque in the extreme, our data will be harvested by the people in the highest positions imaginable—you know, the kind of people who travel to Davos for polite debates.
You can run all you want, but you cannot hide.
Resistance is futile. Digital IDs may soon be the norm. In the United States, as analysts at Reclaim The Net recently reported, the U.S. Postal Service is pushing for the introduction of digital IDs. The USPS wants to “have a more prominent role in biometric data collection and digital ID services.”
More worryingly, the USPS has already partnered with the General Services Administration (GSA) and the FBI, two prominent “biometric data collection pilots.”
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