The administration has sold the portal as frictionless. At the launch, Joe Gebbia, Chief Design Officer of the National Design Studio, said users are not required to log in and that the platform does not track them, according to Federal News Network.
The site's privacy page, per Nextgov, says it uses no web tracking and saves no conversations. All of that may be true of the question box you can type into today.
The order describes a different animal. Its purpose section calls America.gov a point of entry "through which an individual may sign in." Section 4(b) tells GSA to integrate Login.gov, "including using Login.gov as the authentication service for America.gov." Section 5(b)(iii) orders every agency to complete Login.gov integration under OMB Memorandum M-26-18, which Federal News Network describes as the memo mandating Login.gov for most federal websites.
At the launch, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz presented a plan for Americans to verify their identities through Login.gov and pass that information to CMS, the Social Security Administration and Veterans Affairs, Nextgov reports.
So the White House is not fibbing when it says you needn't sign in. It is describing the lobby. The order describes the building. An anonymous portal that answers trivia and demands credentials once it handles your Medicare enrollment is a sensible design. But it is a different pitch from the one in the launch remarks, where the no-login language lives, while the sign-in language sits in the order's first paragraph.
An inference follows, and it is labeled as one.
It rests on Section 2(c) of the order and on the Login.gov mandate above. Section 2(c) promises that unified access will not create "a centralized Federal system of records concerning the American people."
Sections 4 and 5, however, route authentication for covered services (those with more than 100,000 annual users, excluding IRS tax filing, the Department of War and the Intelligence Community) through one shared identity service.
My reasoning is that a records system and an identity layer are different things, and the order disclaims the first while mandating the second. Records may stay in agency custody, yet a single credential would open all of them, and the order says nothing about what logs that credential leaves behind.
That deserves an answer before OMB's 90-day implementation memo arrives, not after.
The administration has sold the portal as frictionless. At the launch, Joe Gebbia, Chief Design Officer of the National Design Studio, said users are not required to log in and that the platform does not track them, according to Federal News Network.
The site's privacy page, per Nextgov, says it uses no web tracking and saves no conversations. All of that may be true of the question box you can type into today.
The order describes a different animal. Its purpose section calls America.gov a point of entry "through which an individual may sign in." Section 4(b) tells GSA to integrate Login.gov, "including using Login.gov as the authentication service for America.gov." Section 5(b)(iii) orders every agency to complete Login.gov integration under OMB Memorandum M-26-18, which Federal News Network describes as the memo mandating Login.gov for most federal websites.
At the launch, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz presented a plan for Americans to verify their identities through Login.gov and pass that information to CMS, the Social Security Administration and Veterans Affairs, Nextgov reports.
So the White House is not fibbing when it says you needn't sign in. It is describing the lobby. The order describes the building. An anonymous portal that answers trivia and demands credentials once it handles your Medicare enrollment is a sensible design. But it is a different pitch from the one in the launch remarks, where the no-login language lives, while the sign-in language sits in the order's first paragraph.
An inference follows, and it is labeled as one.
It rests on Section 2(c) of the order and on the Login.gov mandate above. Section 2(c) promises that unified access will not create "a centralized Federal system of records concerning the American people."
Sections 4 and 5, however, route authentication for covered services (those with more than 100,000 annual users, excluding IRS tax filing, the Department of War and the Intelligence Community) through one shared identity service.
My reasoning is that a records system and an identity layer are different things, and the order disclaims the first while mandating the second. Records may stay in agency custody, yet a single credential would open all of them, and the order says nothing about what logs that credential leaves behind.
That deserves an answer before OMB's 90-day implementation memo arrives, not after.