Wired Estonia

Public Television (PBS) had a great show tonight featuring Estonia's e-card system.

The technology is impressive and easy to imagine the benefits of. The much harder part is dealing with the fact that all of the information collected can be accessed by government (a class of people granted access). This amounts to a frontal assault on our privacy.

Does it have to be a question of service or privacy, but not both? Is there a solution acceptable to everyone? Estonia claims to have it's system setup this way, to serve the people and not the government. Either I missed it, or they didn't cover how they do it, but it would be interested to know.

Bill