>. Introducing one in the UK would fundamentally reshape our relationship with the state<p>Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing. Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does, if you emigrate from the UK to Switzerland, does anyone feel they've now entered a fundamentally new relationship with the state because of an ID card?<p>National identity needs to be tracked in any country, regardless whether you have an ID card, and all the systems the UK has in place prove that point, the card doesn't change anything other than actually guaranteeing some standards and safety and consistency and providing some utility.<p>If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute, and the standard actually demands that those requests are ephemeral. Can anyone tell me why that's worse than some patchwork of private verification industries who leak your data every two months or sell them to god knows who?<p>In the US government agencies buy license plate data from private firms because they can't collect it legally, I assume UK agencies (would) do similar things if they want identity data.<p>Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from unifying data? What are all those UK government contracts with Palantir for? Great now you're under surveillance <i>AND</i> you get the privilege of paying a private American firm with taxpayer money for it
> This isn’t about a philosophical position on privacy. It’s about who the government shares our information with, and how it treats us based on what it thinks it knows about us.<p>The article mentions just one incident in India in passing, but whole books could be written on the resident (not citizen) ID scheme and the problems it has created in India. Now there’s a push in India for a new national health ID to help private companies gather more data in a country with no data privacy laws.<p>Unlike the UK where the national ID project was junked a decade ago (as mentioned in the article), in India the story of rights being trampled while an uncaring judiciary spends time on more trivial matters should be a lesson to people in other countries.<p>Keep the fight against mass surveillance on. Times of crisis, like the current pandemic, are great opportunities for governments to push policies that will have long term negative effects.<p>“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!”
More opportunity for the British government to spy on its citizens and repress them. You have to understand that the UK is probably the most surveilled country that claims to be a democracy. Countries like Germany do ID cards for the benefit of citizens. The UK would do it to subjugate the population.
A digital ID, if done properly, can actually increase privacy and anonymity, not decrease it.<p>Without digital ID, everyone who needs to verify your identity for legal reasons needs to get a lot of data about you and verify that manually. This increases costs, friction and the chances of a leak, after all, most of your data lives in dozens of private databases, some of them possibly insecure. Over here (in Poland), phone carriers need to verify your identity before selling you a SIM (for anti-terrorism reasons). The carrier me and my family have used in the past has recently had a leak, and we had to scramble to change our ID numbers and report the leak everywhere we could. Just because they had lots of data and pictures of our ID.<p>With a digital ID, a company can just ask the government to perform the needed checks, without ever storing any information about you. You want to do something that's only allowed for people over 18? The government can respond with a true/false response, without revealing any of your data to a company that has no business processing it in the first place.<p>Same for all kinds of verification. Instead of storing lots of personal data about you on company servers, store a unique, government-issued token that is tied to your identity. No one but the government knows who this token is tied to, or even what company requested it. You're effectively anonymous. Only when you commit a crime, a company passes the token to the court, which is able to retrieve the actual identity from government servers.<p>Those systems are far more secure than the mess we have now.
Ignoring my main concern that any digital project led by the current government will no doubt fail and be used as another excuse to funnel billions to "friends" (not alarmist, but fact), as someone else comments:<p>"It’s not just about government. Introduce a digital ID and instantly it’ll become a requirement to give your digital ID to do anything at all - register a mobile phone, a bank account, an online shop, a library, a pub ... anything. Thus, as the article says, your whole life can be linked together and surveilled, not only by government but by dozens of unaccountable corporations."
There is a precedent in the UK. ID cards were introduced during WWII and originally were used for four tasks. By the end of the war and afterwards the scope creep had increased to something like 37. Police were demanding to see Id when driving and it was one motorist (Harry Willcock) who refused and when it came to court the Judge agreed and ID cards were scrapped.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939</a>
A good ID scheme can preserve privacy when it includes functions to do anonymous attestation. For instance if you are required to prove age or residence, but the other party does not need any other information about you.<p>A scheme which supports hashed identity (e.g. hashing your ID number along with the ID number of the party requesting, resulting in a unique identifier) can be used for services that require one account pr. person.<p>When this is available out-of-band (e.g. a smart card or app [not requiring going through government servers each time]) no leaks can occur.