Hakeem Anwar is a software engineer with over 20 years in tech, and the founder and CEO of Above Phone, a conscious technology company building open source phones, laptops, and software services that free people from reliance on Big Tech. After years of building web and mobile apps for large corporations, he walked away from corporate life during Covid. He also runs Take Back Our Tech, a weekly show covering the biggest stories in tech - always with solutions. Hakeem has done extensive research into the global digital ID rollout, co-authoring the “Life Under Digital ID” report, which maps how 90% of countries already have operational digital ID or will within three years. In this conversation, we discuss global standards enabling biometric interoperability across borders, why “voluntary” always becomes mandatory, and Hakeem demonstrates the Above Phone on screen, making the case for why the window to migrate to open protocols is closing faster than most people realize.
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Takeaways:
“Voluntary” is a word governments use to normalize something they plan to make mandatory. India’s Aadhaar was “voluntary” too until you couldn’t rent an apartment or open a bank account without it. They never need to pass a law forcing you. They just wait until enough people are in the system, and then exclusion does the work for them.
The global digital ID rollout is one interoperable infrastructure built on shared standards. W3C Verifiable Credentials and ISO 18013-5 mean the profile your government builds on you does not stay in your country. It follows you across borders. The biometric check at the airport is the system working exactly as designed.
Losing your Social Security number is recoverable. Losing your biometric identity is something else entirely. You can change a password. You cannot change your face. Once your legal identity is linked to your biometrics, you have not just signed up for a convenience app, you have made yourself permanently legible to any system connected to that infrastructure - forever.
The most dangerous moment in any surveillance rollout is when the technology runs ahead of the law. The privacy protections for digital ID have not been written yet and the system is already being built. By the time legislation exists to protect you, your data will have been flowing for years.
The question “where do I go to escape this?” is the wrong question. The rollout is everywhere, no country has opted out. The better question is: what layer of this system can I refuse to participate in, and how do I build local relationships that do not require it? Community is the one infrastructure that surveillance systems cannot fully replicate.
Big Tech phones are not just data collection devices, they are control points. Google and Apple hold the signing keys to every app on their stores. That means any application you depend on for freedom like encrypted messaging, Bitcoin wallets, decentralized tools, can be removed from your device at any time, without your consent. The device is the chokepoint, and most people have handed it over without realizing it.
End-to-end encryption is only as strong as the device running it. Communicating through Signal on a phone that logs your keystrokes gives you the theater of privacy, not the substance of it. Privacy is a stack. The protocol, the app, and the hardware all have to be trustworthy, or the weakest link defeats everything else.
The fact that a privacy tool receives government funding should make you more curious, not more comfortable. It does not mean the tool is compromised, but it is a reason to keep looking, keep asking, and never treat any single solution as the final answer. In the freedom stack, trust is earned incrementally and tested over time.
When age verification moves to the operating system level, it is not about protecting children, it’s about building the mechanism to tie your digital identity to every piece of software you run. Self-report is just the opening move. The end state is “sign in with your digital ID,” and the big OS makers will be happy to comply.
Bitcoin taught me something I now apply to everything: when a platform kicks you out, it’s an invitation to find the better protocol underneath. Every time censorship found me - Stripe, Telegram, Substack - I found an alternative that did not need my compliance. The friction of exclusion is exactly what forces you toward real sovereignty.
Nostr is what self-sovereign identity was always supposed to be before governments co-opted the phrase. When you own your private key on Nostr, your followers, your social graph, and your content travel with you wherever you go. No platform can delete you from the protocol. That architecture is the antidote, not the alternative.
There is a small window, probably until 2027, before age verification and biometric requirements become baked into the hardware and operating systems most people use. The people who migrate their devices, communication, and identity to open protocols now will have real optionality. The people who wait will face a much harder transition from inside a system that already knows exactly who they are.
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— Support my work —
I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
