censusdigital ID cardsDigital Information and Smart Data BillKeir StarmerLabourPoliticsUK
Latest from the Newsroom
08:00
16:00
16:00
July 25, 2024 - 7:00am
Digital ID cards sound a bit Big Brother-ish, but the new Labour government has (despite Tony Blair’s best efforts) ruled out introducing mandatory identity passes. By contrast, the Digital Verification Services mentioned in the King’s Speech, as part of the Digital Information and Smart Data Bill, sound like a very handy thing in a world where we do so much online. So are civil liberties groups overreacting with cries of Digital ID by the back door?
The proposed digital systems will allow Brits to verify their identity, or key things such as age and citizenship status, with no proposal to require such identification on demand from any state authority. Further, they will be administered by private companies. All the Government will provide is a “Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework” to set standards which approved ID — sorry, Digital Verification Service — providers must meet.
Being able to prove who you are, or that you meet certain criteria — being old enough to buy cigarettes, for example — is undoubtedly useful, which is why the providers have been pushing for this framework to enable them to expand into a lucrative market. What would turn that convenience into a “Papers, please” society would be expanding the scope of state powers to require that we prove our identities on demand.
Unfortunately, once such digital ID systems become widely used, mission creep is difficult to prevent. Even if the state does not directly start demanding papers, the impossibility of renting a home, starting a job, or opening a bank account without recognised digital ID will make it impossible to function without one.
More worrying, though, is the proposal to link together all our records within Government systems into one unified record. Civil servants, exasperated by the plethora of databases and portals through which we interact with state systems and services, have long pushed for a single administrative identity for each citizen. Sweden is among several countries to assign each person a number that follows them from school to doctor to tax office, and it’s easy to see why UK officials look with envy at the ease of linking the different dimensions of our relationship with the state. The UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) account already effectively functions as a digital ID to allow non-UK-citizens to prove their right to work or rent a home, and can also be accessed by the DWP, HMRC, DVLA and NHS. No such system yet exists for UK citizens.
There are good reasons to resist this move, however easy it would make the lives of well-meaning bureaucrats. That ease is not a sufficient reason to make a change with so many pitfalls. The most obvious is that the more unified the database, the more attractive — and potentially vulnerable — it becomes to hackers.
Mission creep, again, is a real risk. As Internet Law expert Paul Bernal points out, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, supposedly targeting organised crime and terrorism, was then used to investigate dog mess and parents trying to get their kids into non-local schools.
Pupil nationality data, ostensibly collected to assess the impact of immigration on education, was shared with the Home Office and used to target the children of illegal immigrants. The outcry that led to that repurposing of data about schoolchildren was a reminder that the relationship of trust underlying our willingness to share data with authorities is not hom*ogenous.
Some Brits may, for example, trust schools or the NHS with their data — either because of their competence or because they perceive their use of it as benefitting society — more than they trust the Home Office or DWP. Linking all official data sources together risks reducing that trust to a lowest common denominator. This happened in 1991 when the census was — wrongly — suspected of being used as a register for the new, unpopular Poll Tax. Around a million people did not appear on that year’s census, rendering it much less reliable as a data source.
A plurality of official digital identities may make life harder for civil servants — and for us, when accessing Government services. A little friction slows down everyday transactions, but it also does wonders to protect us from a slippery slope towards needless surveillance.
Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofingand How To Disagree. Herbook,Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.
