Google will soon start beta testing “a new type of digital ID in Google Wallet, giving more people in more places a way to create and store a digital ID, now with a U.S. passport,” the company said last week.
According to Jenny Cheng, vice president and general manager of Google Wallet, Google’s new digital passport “works at select TSA [Transportation Security Administration] checkpoints, saving you time and stress at the airport when you’re traveling domestically.”
However, a digital ID in Google Wallet is “not a replacement for your physical ID,” at least for now, Cheng said.
According to the TSA, digital ID is now accepted at 29 airports across the U.S.
Along with the launch of digital versions of U.S. passports, Google announced that it is expanding the number of states that allow residents to add their driver’s licenses and state-issued ID cards to Google Wallet.
“We recently expanded the ability for Android users in California to save their state-issued ID or driver’s license in their Google Wallet app,” Cheng wrote in a blog post. “In the coming months, people with an Iowa, New Mexico or Ohio state-issued ID will also be able to save their ID in Wallet,” Cheng wrote.
Colorado is releasing a new reader within the MyColorado app that will allow businesses to “securely and easily accept digital IDs,” Cheng said.
Google also is adding “select prepaid commuter benefit cards” to Google Wallet, and Google is “working with transit and payment providers to bring mobile payments to more commuters globally.”
Digital ID critics told The Defender that tools like digital passports will give Google and other Big Tech companies unprecedented power and knowledge of our day-to-day lives.
Seamus Bruner, author of “Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life,” said:
“Google is ubiquitous and knows more about us than we realize. We should absolutely be worried about its digital ID ambitions based on Google’s past privacy abuses and censorship.
“Digital ID gives Google more power and control to steer society toward authoritarianism.”
Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, said “Digital IDs serve to incentivize, coerce or otherwise manipulate human behavior. The more data and credentials associated with a digital ID, the more control public and private entities have over your life.”
Noting that Google is a private firm that “traces its origins back to U.S. intelligence community grants for mass surveillance efforts,” Hinchliffe said the expansion of the Google Wallet to include government-issued documents is “yet another example of public-private collaboration leading to corporatism and fascism.”
Hinchliffe added:
“As a private company, Google already de-ranks and demonetizes content it doesn’t agree with. What happens if you say something that Google deems to be a violation of its policies? Will your digital ID still work then? Will your access to government credentials be affected? What happens to your data? Will you be put on some type of naughty list?”
Digital ID may lead to ‘function creep,’ surveillance of our health data
Google’s ambitions do not appear to be restricted to digital versions of ID cards, passports and transit passes.
“We’re working with partners so you can use digital IDs in even more situations — for example, in the future we believe you should be able to use digital ID for things like account recovery, identity verification and even car rentals,” Cheng wrote.
According to Biometric Update, Google Wallet integrated “dozens of banks” in June and is planning to add support for digital versions of “everything else” in the future.
“Documents that Google Wallet will soon support include health insurance, loyalty cards, residence permits, vehicle registration, library cards, event tickets and voter ID cards, along with those mentioned above. There is also an ‘other’ category for documents the app can’t recognize, and users can enter those credentials’ information manually,” Biometric Update reported in July.
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda,” told The Defender that digital tools have a tendency to expand to uses that go beyond what was initially intended or announced.
“Digital ID is prone to function creep, which means it will accrete new functions as the system develops. It will include health data, inclusive of vaccine status,” he said.
Function creep may lead to health surveillance, Rectenwald said:
“This development represents Google’s entrance into the healthcare industry, which means the digitalization of health records, and, linked with Internet of Bodies technologies, of our bodily functions in real time. That would amount to the ‘surveillance under the skin’ that Yuval Noah Harari has heralded.”
Indeed, according to Biometric Update, Google is looking to expand into health ID:
“Google’s new digital identity functionality is also set to extend to health insurance cards. The company is collaborating with health insurance firm Humana, which will see a digital version of its health insurance card become available in Google Wallet.”
This is part of an ongoing partnership between Google and Humana “to co-develop solutions focused on population health and bringing the best of Google’s AI [artificial intelligence] technologies and products to Humana members and patients” and “leverage cutting-edge AI capabilities to accelerate innovation in healthcare.”
In a separate post on Google’s blog, Alan Stapelberg, group product manager for Google Wallet, wrote that the company is “working to make digital identity a reality for everyone.”
Stapelberg wrote:
“Digital ID adoption will truly scale when daily use cases like driving a car, picking up prescriptions and more can be done with a digital ID. There’s also a future where digital IDs can be used for things like online tax filing, signing a home loan, opening a bank account or signing up for medical benefits — all from your phone. And the industry is working to make these things happen.
“This will take time: Legislation, hardware updates and behavior change don’t happen overnight. We’re working with various parts of the ecosystem — including companies designing hardware for ID acceptance — to speed up in-person adoption.”
Stapelberg cited digital versions of U.S. passports as another means “to accelerate the overall awareness, adoption and use of digital IDs … by creating new ways for people to get them.”
But for Hinchliffe, “The goal has always been to implement digital ID on a massive scale, so that you will essentially need one in order to participate in many aspects of society. We saw this with vaccine passports.”
With its foray into digital ID, Google is entering a field where another prominent Big Tech firm, Apple, already has a significant presence. Several states already offer digital ID cards and driver’s licenses via Apple Wallet. Last month, Apple announced that California will soon offer these documents via Apple Wallet as well.
Citizens under total surveillance ‘will be on their best behavior’
Google’s announcements came as a prominent Big Tech executive predicted a future where all humans would be under constant surveillance.
According to Business Insider, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, last week told attendees at a meeting of the company’s financial analysts, “We’re going to have supervision. … Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.”
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said.
Rectenwald said digital ID will help fulfill Ellison’s vision. “The major issues with Google’s digital ID have to do with Google’s collection of biometric data and the question of what other data Google ID stores and transmits to Google databases.”
Rectenwald added:
“Imagine every person on the planet enrolled in the Google digital ID platform. Just as Google Maps has digitized all the space through which people travel, Google digital ID would have real-time data on the whereabouts of everyone, all linked to biometric data and connected to Google Maps.
“This would mean the completion of an unparalleled panoptical surveillance system, the digital gulag that I warned about in my book, ‘Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom.’”
Bruner said that the end goal for Big Tech firms like Google is the establishment of “a social credit system where compliance with the controligarchs’ agenda is rewarded and resistance to the agenda is penalized.”
“Most people think that they will be able to resist this agenda, but when the controligarchs threaten the ability to feed families, most people will comply,” Bruner said. “It will crush freedom as we know it.”
Citizens’ “best behavior” may include avoiding discussion of “conspiracy theories.” According to a Sept. 12 article in Science, researchers have developed an AI chatbot that “shows promise in talking people out of conspiracy theories.”
“Some people do change their minds when fact-based arguments are delivered by an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot instead of another human being. Personalized conversations with this ‘debunkbot’ can turn even hardcore conspiracy theorists into budding skeptics,” Science reported.
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According to Stapelberg, “privacy” is “built in” to Google Wallet’s digital ID technology and Google Wallet’s security measures “put you in full control of your digital identity.” He said digital IDs “offer clear advantages over physical IDs” due to these capabilities.
But critics warned that, far from protecting user privacy and data, Google’s push for digital ID belies a push for exclusion and “total control.”
“Most issuers of digital IDs say that you are in control of your data, and you decide who you get to share it with, but if you decide to opt out and not get the digital ID, or if you decide to not share your data, then you may not be able to access certain goods or services that are essential to your everyday life,” Hinchliffe said.
Catherine Austin Fitts is the founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and an outspoken critic of digital ID. She told The Defender, “Of course Google wants in on the game. The push for total central control is out of control — there is power and money to be had.”
Experts connected the push for digital ID with the potential implementation of digital money and a central bank digital currency (CBDC), with Fitts noting that the Bank of International Settlements and its member national central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, “have committed to implement CBDCs.”
“Digital ID and CBDC go hand in glove to form a social credit system like China uses to force compliance in brutal ways,” Bruner said. “Your digital ID is not a digitized driver’s license, it is a comprehensive profile built upon everything you do, buy, say, read, watch, listen to and effectively what you think.”
Digital ID “will give the central banks the power to track expenditures, set rules on how CBDCs can be used and enforce those rules centrally,” Fitts said.
“The implementation of such a system requires first and foremost a digital ID,” Fitts noted, calling it “the next step to total financial control by the central banks.”
If this happens, “CBDC allows them to apply financial pressure on you and perhaps even ‘cancel’ your bank account,” Bruner said.
