I mean, you can run python (or their own language “LibreOffice Basic”) from within a Libreoffice Calc sheet.

Calc’s scripting is actually more powerful than the aging VBA thing Excel uses for macros, imho.

Still, the title is misdirected, and it sounds like Proton trying to do marketing.

Neither is it true that Europe is ready yet (most companies are stuck with MS products like the other commenter said) nor are all those who want to switch looking for privacy (but rather more independence from US).

Oh, I see the misunderstadning.

Note that “authentication and login” does not necessarily require network communication with a government service. In fact in Europe the eIDs (eIDAS) are digital documents that use cryptography to authenticate without the need of spending resources in a government-funded public API that could be vulnerable to DDOS attacks and would be requiring reliable internet connections for all digital authentication (which might not always be an online operation). The chips are just a secure way to store the digital document and lock under hardware the actual key, making it much harder for it to be copied/replicated, but they don’t require internet connection for making government-certified digital signatures with them that can be used in authentication, this is the same whether the service itself you are login into is online or offline.

In any case, in your example where actual network communication is used, it would still be possible for the government to track you regardless of proxies, because then they can store a log of the data & messages exchanged in the authentication.

They can either ask the sites to authenticate previously with the government for the use of the API (which would make sense to prevent DDOS and other abuse, for example), which would let them know immediately which site you were asking login for (in a much more direct way than with “documents”), or simply provide a token to the site as result of the user authentication (which is a common practice anyway, most authentication systems work through tokens) and later at any given time in the future ask the sites to provide back which tokens are linked to each account on the site (just like I was saying before with the “documents” example) so the government can map each token with each individual person and know which users of that site correspond to which individuals.

I feel you are talking about a different thing now. My point was surrounding what you initially said:

The only right way to do this, is if governments provide their citizens with an eID that any site can ask “is this person 18+?” and get an accurate answer without any other identifiable info. And if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.

An eID is a digital document. You yourself are proposing that sites should request people to provide a document, one that’s issued by the government to you, personally. Then later you said that using a proxy prevents the government to know what you visit.

My answer was that if you are providing a government-issued document/file to the service then the government (the issuer) can know if you visit the site just by keeping track of who did they issue each document for and requesting the sites for copies of the documents. Even if the document itself does not say your name. And that’s regardless of how many proxy layers you use, since there’s traceability in the document. This makes you fundamentally less anonymous to the government than before (when you could have indeed used a proxy to prevent this), this makes proxies no longer a good defense.

The service does not know you, but that’s not the point, what you said is that the government can’t know if you visit the site, which is the one thing I disagreed with.

They might not know the list of sites you visit right away in the same way they could by contacting your ISP when you are not using a proxy, but that wasn’t my point.

My point is that they can check with a specific site that uses this verification method and see if you have an account on that site, and if you do, which account in particular. And in a way that is much more directly linked to you personally than an IP address (which might be linked to the household/internet access you’re using but not necessarily to your name personally).

So in this situation they can indeed know if you use any one particular site that they choose to target, as long as that site is requiring you to provide them with a document, regardless of how many layers of proxies you (or the site) choose to be under.

I’m not sure what you mean by “the site that’s requesting this”, the site does not need to request anything from the government, they just need to have previously agreed on a “secret” mathematical verification method that works for every document. The digital equivalent of a stamp/signature.

They don’t need to know the requesting address in order for them to know if it was you the person corresponding to that proof of age, because the information is in the data being exchanged. These kind of verifications don’t depend or rely on IP address or networking, these are credentials that are checked on the application layer.

In fact, they don’t even need to directly communicate with the government for this.

This is equivalent to a registration office for a service asking you provide a paper stamped by the government that certifies your age without the paper actually saying who you are… the service does not need to contact the government if they can trust the stamp in the paper and the government official signature (which in this case is mathematical proof). And even though the service office can’t see your name in the paper, the government knows that the number written in the paper links to you individually, because they can keep record of which particular paper number was issued to which individual, even if your name wasn’t written in the document itself.

So, the government can, at any given time, go to those offices, ask them to hand in the paper corresponding to a particular registration and check the number to see who it belongs to.

The traceability is in the document, not in the manner in which you send it. It does not matter if you send the document to a different country for someone else to send it from a different address, on your behalf (ie. a proxy). If the government can internally cross-reference the registration papers as being the ones linked to your governmental ID, they can know it’s yours regardless of how it reached the offices. So this way they can check if you registered yourself in any particular place they wanna target and what your account is.

I agree that a government that wants privacy can actually do it in a way that ensures privacy. That’s also what I was saying.

My point was that this is up to the government, and no amount of “route the request through a proxy” would patch that up, that’s not gonna help this case. Because this is not something that’s tracked in the networking layer, it’s in the application layer.

If the government wants to protect privacy, they can do it without you needing to use proxies, and if the government wants to see what sites you visit using these certificates, they can do it even if you were to use proxies.

If you have no way to link the signature to the original document, then how do you validate that the signature is coming from a document without repetition / abuse?

How do you ensure there aren’t hundreds of signatures used for different accounts all done by the same stolen eID that might be circulating online without the government realizing it?

Can the government revoke the credentials of a specific individual? …because if they can’t then that looks like a big gap that could create a market of ever-growing stolen eIDs (or reusing eIDs from the deceased) …and if they can revoke, what stops the government from creating a simulation in which they revoke one specific individual and then check what signatures end up being revoked to identify which ones belong to that person? The government can mandate the services to provide them all data they have so it can be analyzed as if they were Issuer, Registry and Verifier, all in one, without separation of powers.

I know there are ways to try and fix this, but those ways have other problems too, which end up forcing the need for a compromise… there’s no algorithm that perfectly provides anonymity and full verifiability with a perfect method of revocation that does not require checks at every user login. For example, with the eIDAS 2.0 system (considered zero-knowledge proof), the government does have knowledge of the “secret serial number” that is used in revocation, so if they collude with the service they can identify people by running some tests on the data.

That prevents the site from knowing your identity, but I’m not convinced it prevents the government from knowing you visit the site. The government could keep track of which document corresponds to which individual whenever they issue / sign it.

So if the government mandated that each signed proof of “age>18” was stored by the service and mapped to each account (to validate their proof), then the government could request the service to provide them copy of the proof and then cross-check from their end which particular individual is linked to it.

if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.

I feel a proxy would not really make much of a difference. If the government keeps a mapping of which eID corresponds to each real person from their end (which they would do if they want to know what sites you visit) then they can simply request the services (and/or intermediaries) to provide account mapping of the eIDs (and they could mandate by law those records are kept, like they often do with ISPs and their IP addresses). The service might not know who that eID belongs to… but the government can know it, if they want.

The government needs to want to protect your privacy. If the government really wants to know what sites you visit, there’s no reason why they would want to provide you with a eID that is truly anonymous at all levels and that isn’t really linked to you, not even in state-owned databases.

SIM card is absolutely required even for emergency services

For anyone wondering: while technically the cell towers might be able to accept emergency calls even without network authentication (which is what’s the SIM is for), there are countries/places that will still require an active SIM with the excuse of wanting to prevent hoax calls.