Ideally, a relying party that needs to verify certain attributes of a user would do so all by himself. However, in the new German eID system there are currently 7 so called eID service providers that handle this task on behalf of many relying parties. The Germans did this to allow service providers to quickly adopt the new eID system, because they can simply contract an eID service provider instead of implementing the functionality themselves. However, this creates a hotspot. For all users the eID service provider sees all attributes verified for all relying parties it services. The eID service provider is therefore in principle able to link a user to all the relying parties it visits, together with the relevant attributes. This appears to be a serious privacy risk. Or isn’t it?