It's surveillance to the extent any ID system is surveillance. This is a digital form of all the IDs you get from the state already. There are genuine concern

It's surveillance to the extent any ID system is surveillance. This is a digital form of all the IDs you get from the state already. There are genuine concerns about the scale at which digital IDs can potentially be exploited and/or the scale of monitoring this can enable, but in functional societies and governments you can build laws and systems to mitigate such issues. The alternative are low quality ad hoc systems that offer convenience, but have no incentive for privacy and/or security. For example, consider the massive Experian hack in the US. A credit score is basically required if you want to be a functioning member of American society. And yet they barely got a slap on the wrist and continue with their pathetically poor security practices. And it's not like they (or any US entity, for that matter) will not make their data available to the government. In fact, with a government controlled DB the voters can have far more say on what the govt can do with that data, as opposed to Apple or Google owning that data (which is what's happenign in the US with Apple providing digital ID for states, and I'm sure Google will get into that as well), which becomes their private data and as a member of society you have no say on what can be done with that.