9 ms·

The UK's online ID plans: expensive, intrusive, unnecessary

61 points by severine 6y ago

Barrin92 6y ago
>. Introducing one in the UK would fundamentally reshape our relationship with the state 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? 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. 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? 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. 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 AND you get the privilege of paying a private American firm with taxpayer money for it
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  > 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? What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay? > 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? Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs? > Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from unifying data? Absolutely.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay? no, therefore it doesn't meaningfully change the relationship to the state, unless one agrees that those countries are somehow qualitatively different than the UK or before they had IDs. The author tries to appeal to fear and is being dramatic. Arguments along the lines of "this will fundamentally change X" are just rhetoric to use people's scepticism of change. It's the same kind of thing you see in US politics when some politician goes "and they'll take your freedoms, and your meat, and your guns" regardless of what the actual legislation says >Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs? because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs, and to be honest I trust an (ideally open) algorithm more than a random person. Just a year ago[1] a cop was caught sniffing around in a database and stalking women under the guise of police business. So if you ask me, eliminating people from data processing is a feature. [1]https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on-over-100-women-in-1833156806 https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on-ove...
    - gruez 6y ago
      >because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs Isn't that problematic because all Timmy has to do get his hands on booze is to lay his eyes on someone's ID? I don't see how the scheme is any more secure than validating the order wasn't placed with a prepaid credit card (presumably only adults have access to non-prepaid credit cards). It makes much more sense to do the verification on delivery, rather than when you're placing the order.
      - cinntaile 6y ago
        It's not that easy. To use someone's electronic ID as verification you either need their ID card and their ID pin code and probably access to their computer as well or mobile phone (+ access to it) and their ID pin code.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
- Normille 6y ago
  >Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing... I think it's similar in a way to the argument in the US about the right to bear arms. In the UK there's a similar kind of "inalienable right" feeling that we [as citizens] are not the property of the state and therefore are under no obligation to carry a piece of paper which identifies us as if we were a piece of state property. Theoretically in the UK you do not even have to give your name if asked by the Police, unless you are under arrest. There's also an association of ID cards being symbolic of totalitarian regimes, viz. the Nazis or Communist Russians of so much popular culture, grim-faced and eternally demanding "Your papers!" You can argue that in the form of Driving Licenses / bank cards / work ID cards, most people here are already carrying ways to prove their ID when required and that an officially issued card wouldn't make much practical difference, but the stigma against a state issued ID card still remains.
- gruez 6y ago
  >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. There are advantages in making it harder to request id. Imagine a world where any website or app can validate your identity by tapping your national id on your phone/tablet/computer (via NFC). I would think every website is going to start asking for your national id for account creation or login, for "security" and "anti-fraud" purposes of course. We already see this with phone validation for major services (eg. google, outlook, twitter). At least with phone validation it's not directly linked to your real life identity, and you can get burner phones.
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    Belgium has an eid card which is an older version of just that: Put the card in a smart card reader and type your 4 digit pin. In practice it is used almost exclusivelt by governements, e.g. login to tax on web. Healthcare also uses it. I did as an experiment use it to log myself in on a personal website. Wasn't hard to set up. The sky hasn't fallen here.
  - angio 6y ago
    Italy has a digital identity provider (SPID) and certified email (PEC, which is basically email + digital identity) and only government websites, bank and insurrances use it. It is much better than the alternative in the UK, where you either visit a branch in person or send a copy of your ID (passport or driving licence) together with proof of address (a bank statement), hoping they won't leak the documents at some point.
  - andreskytt 6y ago
    Not necessarily. Integration with the id infra is a hassle and entering your pin (adding a cryptographic proof to the tap) is a ux obstacle. Only organizations that really benefit from that in terms of risk reduction will do that. Speaking from experience in Estonia.
- pmachinery 6y ago
  > Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does Virtually (or maybe absolutely) every undemocratic country on this planet has national ID cards. China, a bastion of repression does, Syria does, North Korea does, Russia does. > If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute Versus the "substantial erosion of civil liberties" senior officials of the British state admit will occur from a national ID.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  If you think surveillance and/or governmental action as a whole is unethical, then it only follows that you'd be against any streamlining or increasing efficiency of said systems. If a government does evil things -- and governments do evil things pretty often -- then the rational conclusion is to muddle the bureaucracy and make it as ineffective as possible.
- flarg 6y ago
  In the UK we already have sufficient identification for all purposes, we don't need more. I also have experience of the current identify systems and they do not unify identities as well as you think they do, and any attempt to do so has failed. This proposal is only to enrich American IT consultancies and we don't need any more of that thank you.
  - kennydude 6y ago
    We really don't. To prove who you are you need a driving license, or a passport, even if you are not planning on using either for their intended purposes. Both cost money, and if you don't spend extra money (which a lot of people may not have) to get a full driving license, require renewal fees. Otherwise you need to have x number of documents from 1 list, and y number of documents from another. And hope that you've got them, or bad luck. It's honestly a nightmare when you get older and places don't even accept a birth certificate and bills going online. A lot of places don't accept PDF printouts of bills too!
    - flarg 6y ago
      You think an id card would be free?
- andreskytt 6y ago
  And you do not get any benefits either. UK could drive identity theft to effectively zero, reduce the pandemic by moving mundane transactions online, reduce carbon emissions by making electronic signature widespread etc. etc. Yes, this would allow for privacy infringements. No, this has not happened in countries where such things are commonplace. Quite the other way around: since identity is vague and fraud rampant, service providers hoover up data to manage their risk. Since lack of identity means no meaningful interoperability, hundreds of copies of your personal data float around waiting to be sold. How is all that giving people more privacy?
- abraxas 6y ago
  Yes, the UK state has implemented far more egregious privacy violations than a national ID card.
TLightful 6y ago
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: "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."
- wtmt 6y ago
  > 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: > "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." This is exactly what happened in India with its biometric resident ID number, where the executive coerced people to link it with phone numbers, bank accounts and many other institutions (including giving it in schools and colleges), until the lethargic Supreme Court reduced its validity to government funded schemes alone (despite it causing starvation deaths and exclusions of people from their entitlements). Not to be outdone, the government enacted new laws to help private companies use the number, and continues to push for it. The whole series of events has been disastrous, and India does not even have any data privacy laws.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  > 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 Sighs. 4/5 of these examples already require proof of identity in various circumstances. The required identification often comes in the form of either one or a combination of a recent utility bill + driver's license and/or passport. This can make moving house (as an example) a massive PITA -- now I need 3 documents instead of one. -- On data storage / privacy. Pubs/bars/clubs have already trialled schemes where the provided Photo ID is stored for a certain amount of time. (I believe fabric had to do this under the terms of their new license). I've not heard of any breaches yet...? I doubt a digital ID would be very useful in pubs as it can't be linked back to a biometric feature (your pretty face). Online shops... Meh. Does it really matter if Tesco's knows that I prefer low fat mince to high fat? Banks, well.... There's not much hope there. They'll use it and the game will change. C'est la vie. I'll either adapt so I can get a mortgage or I'll continue renting. Edit: on a even deeper level, the reality is that nothing changes. Everyone has some form of UID for me (usually emails). Now it just becomes a standardised identifier across the board. __ I too have low confidence in the current government's ability to do something useful with it.
wtmt 6y ago
> 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. 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. 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. 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. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!”
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  > Times of crisis, like the current pandemic, are great opportunities for governments to push policies that will have long term negative effects. Those times are great for pushing change by anyone. Don’t shoot the messenger.
miki123211 6y ago
A digital ID, if done properly, can actually increase privacy and anonymity, not decrease it. 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. 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. 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. Those systems are far more secure than the mess we have now.
- kennydude 6y ago
  You can only hope they would do build something like that. With their recent IT projects, I have severe doubts. It's like we've gone backwards from the start of the digital transformation the UK was leading...
sys_64738 6y ago
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.
phillipseamore 6y ago
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. 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. 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.
davidhbolton 6y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939

61 points by severine 6y ago

>. Introducing one in the UK would fundamentally reshape our relationship with the state 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? 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. 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? 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. 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 AND you get the privilege of paying a private American firm with taxpayer money for it

ciarannolan 6y ago
> 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? What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay? > 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? Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs? > Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from unifying data? Absolutely.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay? no, therefore it doesn't meaningfully change the relationship to the state, unless one agrees that those countries are somehow qualitatively different than the UK or before they had IDs. The author tries to appeal to fear and is being dramatic. Arguments along the lines of "this will fundamentally change X" are just rhetoric to use people's scepticism of change. It's the same kind of thing you see in US politics when some politician goes "and they'll take your freedoms, and your meat, and your guns" regardless of what the actual legislation says >Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs? because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs, and to be honest I trust an (ideally open) algorithm more than a random person. Just a year ago[1] a cop was caught sniffing around in a database and stalking women under the guise of police business. So if you ask me, eliminating people from data processing is a feature. [1]https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on-over-100-women-in-1833156806 https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on-ove...
  - gruez 6y ago
    >because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs Isn't that problematic because all Timmy has to do get his hands on booze is to lay his eyes on someone's ID? I don't see how the scheme is any more secure than validating the order wasn't placed with a prepaid credit card (presumably only adults have access to non-prepaid credit cards). It makes much more sense to do the verification on delivery, rather than when you're placing the order.
    - cinntaile 6y ago
      It's not that easy. To use someone's electronic ID as verification you either need their ID card and their ID pin code and probably access to their computer as well or mobile phone (+ access to it) and their ID pin code.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
Normille 6y ago
>Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing... I think it's similar in a way to the argument in the US about the right to bear arms. In the UK there's a similar kind of "inalienable right" feeling that we [as citizens] are not the property of the state and therefore are under no obligation to carry a piece of paper which identifies us as if we were a piece of state property. Theoretically in the UK you do not even have to give your name if asked by the Police, unless you are under arrest. There's also an association of ID cards being symbolic of totalitarian regimes, viz. the Nazis or Communist Russians of so much popular culture, grim-faced and eternally demanding "Your papers!" You can argue that in the form of Driving Licenses / bank cards / work ID cards, most people here are already carrying ways to prove their ID when required and that an officially issued card wouldn't make much practical difference, but the stigma against a state issued ID card still remains.
gruez 6y ago
>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. There are advantages in making it harder to request id. Imagine a world where any website or app can validate your identity by tapping your national id on your phone/tablet/computer (via NFC). I would think every website is going to start asking for your national id for account creation or login, for "security" and "anti-fraud" purposes of course. We already see this with phone validation for major services (eg. google, outlook, twitter). At least with phone validation it's not directly linked to your real life identity, and you can get burner phones.
- hyperman1 6y ago
  Belgium has an eid card which is an older version of just that: Put the card in a smart card reader and type your 4 digit pin. In practice it is used almost exclusivelt by governements, e.g. login to tax on web. Healthcare also uses it. I did as an experiment use it to log myself in on a personal website. Wasn't hard to set up. The sky hasn't fallen here.
- angio 6y ago
  Italy has a digital identity provider (SPID) and certified email (PEC, which is basically email + digital identity) and only government websites, bank and insurrances use it. It is much better than the alternative in the UK, where you either visit a branch in person or send a copy of your ID (passport or driving licence) together with proof of address (a bank statement), hoping they won't leak the documents at some point.
- andreskytt 6y ago
  Not necessarily. Integration with the id infra is a hassle and entering your pin (adding a cryptographic proof to the tap) is a ux obstacle. Only organizations that really benefit from that in terms of risk reduction will do that. Speaking from experience in Estonia.
pmachinery 6y ago
> Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does Virtually (or maybe absolutely) every undemocratic country on this planet has national ID cards. China, a bastion of repression does, Syria does, North Korea does, Russia does. > If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute Versus the "substantial erosion of civil liberties" senior officials of the British state admit will occur from a national ID.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
If you think surveillance and/or governmental action as a whole is unethical, then it only follows that you'd be against any streamlining or increasing efficiency of said systems. If a government does evil things -- and governments do evil things pretty often -- then the rational conclusion is to muddle the bureaucracy and make it as ineffective as possible.
flarg 6y ago
In the UK we already have sufficient identification for all purposes, we don't need more. I also have experience of the current identify systems and they do not unify identities as well as you think they do, and any attempt to do so has failed. This proposal is only to enrich American IT consultancies and we don't need any more of that thank you.
- kennydude 6y ago
  We really don't. To prove who you are you need a driving license, or a passport, even if you are not planning on using either for their intended purposes. Both cost money, and if you don't spend extra money (which a lot of people may not have) to get a full driving license, require renewal fees. Otherwise you need to have x number of documents from 1 list, and y number of documents from another. And hope that you've got them, or bad luck. It's honestly a nightmare when you get older and places don't even accept a birth certificate and bills going online. A lot of places don't accept PDF printouts of bills too!
  - flarg 6y ago
    You think an id card would be free?
andreskytt 6y ago
And you do not get any benefits either. UK could drive identity theft to effectively zero, reduce the pandemic by moving mundane transactions online, reduce carbon emissions by making electronic signature widespread etc. etc. Yes, this would allow for privacy infringements. No, this has not happened in countries where such things are commonplace. Quite the other way around: since identity is vague and fraud rampant, service providers hoover up data to manage their risk. Since lack of identity means no meaningful interoperability, hundreds of copies of your personal data float around waiting to be sold. How is all that giving people more privacy?
abraxas 6y ago
Yes, the UK state has implemented far more egregious privacy violations than a national ID card.

TLightful 6y ago

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: "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."

wtmt 6y ago
> 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: > "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." This is exactly what happened in India with its biometric resident ID number, where the executive coerced people to link it with phone numbers, bank accounts and many other institutions (including giving it in schools and colleges), until the lethargic Supreme Court reduced its validity to government funded schemes alone (despite it causing starvation deaths and exclusions of people from their entitlements). Not to be outdone, the government enacted new laws to help private companies use the number, and continues to push for it. The whole series of events has been disastrous, and India does not even have any data privacy laws.
dijksterhuis 6y ago
> 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 Sighs. 4/5 of these examples already require proof of identity in various circumstances. The required identification often comes in the form of either one or a combination of a recent utility bill + driver's license and/or passport. This can make moving house (as an example) a massive PITA -- now I need 3 documents instead of one. -- On data storage / privacy. Pubs/bars/clubs have already trialled schemes where the provided Photo ID is stored for a certain amount of time. (I believe fabric had to do this under the terms of their new license). I've not heard of any breaches yet...? I doubt a digital ID would be very useful in pubs as it can't be linked back to a biometric feature (your pretty face). Online shops... Meh. Does it really matter if Tesco's knows that I prefer low fat mince to high fat? Banks, well.... There's not much hope there. They'll use it and the game will change. C'est la vie. I'll either adapt so I can get a mortgage or I'll continue renting. Edit: on a even deeper level, the reality is that nothing changes. Everyone has some form of UID for me (usually emails). Now it just becomes a standardised identifier across the board. __ I too have low confidence in the current government's ability to do something useful with it.

wtmt 6y ago

> 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. 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. 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. 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. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!”

heavenlyblue 6y ago
> Times of crisis, like the current pandemic, are great opportunities for governments to push policies that will have long term negative effects. Those times are great for pushing change by anyone. Don’t shoot the messenger.

miki123211 6y ago

A digital ID, if done properly, can actually increase privacy and anonymity, not decrease it. 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. 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. 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. Those systems are far more secure than the mess we have now.

kennydude 6y ago
You can only hope they would do build something like that. With their recent IT projects, I have severe doubts. It's like we've gone backwards from the start of the digital transformation the UK was leading...

sys_64738 6y ago

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.

phillipseamore 6y ago

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. 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. 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.

davidhbolton 6y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939