• CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    20·
    12 hours ago

    It’s wild too. I’ve been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn’t accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father’s name.)

    Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing!

    • jacksilver@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 hours ago

      You want them to do that regardless of the how the country keeps track of individuals. The point of all that asking is to make sure they have the right patient for the right procedure.

      You don’t want to have something amputated or removed unless you have to.

    • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 hours ago

      This is a joke right? I really really hope that they aren’t trusting randoms to know how to manage a gpg key properly.

      It’s hard enough to get people actually interested in it to do it correctly.

      And using gpg to constantly identify yourself would mean needing to keep multiple copies of your private key all over the place. I find it unlikely that regular people are issuing new keys and revocation certs properly. Not to mention having canonical key servers (maybe the government could manage that, but the individual is responsible for maintaining a way to get the canonical most up to date key)

      Using gpg backfires because if you lose access to the key or it’s compromised (say by putting it on your phone) you lose everything. They work for people who know what they are doing because you are supposed to issue keys for specific tasks and identities, but there is just no way that that is happening.