Hello, I post this to share my concerns on how the world is going nuts, I tried to reach R3D (Mexican NGO about civil digital rights, it’s like a Mexican mini EFF, both of them even have had previous interactions) and they didn’t respond.
The thing is, since last year Mexico is rolling out “llaveMX” (with voluntarily registration), it’s a national centralized platform where you register your CURP (national unique identifier), your name and your phone, they supposedly did it to reduce/eliminate excessive bureaucracy.
That platform was made to do and track every paperwork or procedure related to the government or social services (e.g. to get your birth certificate, make appointments to public hospitals, gov scholarships, getting your passport, federal paperwork, ASEA (ambiental institution) participation, etc.).
But this week happened something that struck me, TecNM (through my school) sent an email on Sunday 22 at night - Early Monday, that we “have” to do a small course about drugs prevention, but in the few years I’ve been studying here they’ve never given that much care to drugs prevention and there is something catchy, to be able to do the course you need to register on llaveMX and it’s the only way to do it. They even hurry us to complete it ASAP because there is (or was) even money involved: ~$5,800 usd which is a LOT for the first university’s career division to complete it (I don’t know if it was nationwide, only for my uni, for each 126 centralized schools and 122 no-centralized schools or if they are going to give it accordingly to the amount of people who did the course), so they REALLY want us to do it and they are pressing the school divisions by the teachers through the money becase the government has previously cut off a lot of funding for the university.
My main concern is that they are also rolling out the biometric CURP (your identifier + most of your biometrics) and starting July, you won’t be able to use any mobile carrier unless you tie it with your CURP and ID.
The government killed every public institution related to public transparency, and now there are zero safeguards for data protection and data privacy given that authority at every level - military, federal, state, municipal, etc. (it’s worth mentioning that basically the military absorbed the police) can access your every tracked records in llaveMX without any kind of notification or permission, they also want every company within the country that has a database like e-commerce to share every purchase, every login, everything with the centralized database.[1]
And I included the ambiental institution because Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to do ambiental activism.[2]
The cherry on top is that the government (like the taxes agency, ID registry agency and the military) and the major mobile carrier have had previous data breaches including the most recent one with Claude’s help, so we are all screwed. Privacy is dying.
[2]https://www.milenio.com/internacional/mexico-tercer-violento-ambientalistas-global-witness
