Do Brits generally approve of the new compulsory national digital ID?

Link to UK Government & Parliament petition
“Do not introduce Digital ID cards”

please sign and share
currently standing at 2,664,055

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

Thank God,sounds like a normal student

edit of the time ,now they are teetotal or drug takers 😂

So we’re judging someone on the mistakes they made when they were 16 some 25 years after the event. I hope your teenage behaviour was impeccable @scalt. Mine certainly wasn’t.

Yep, Euan Blair. Like father, like son. Although, I haven't yet heard an official source for this - for the moment it's still angry speculation.

Lest we forget, the same Euan Blair who got very drunk just after his exams, was picked up by the police, and gave them a false name and address. (Well, to be fair, who would have believed "Euan Blair, 10 Downing Street"?)

Not really from what I have seen and heard. My main concern is who will get the contract and what they will do with the data.

Exactly. Someone is about to become very wealthy and it’ll be a waste of tax payers money

Sounds like a money making scheme and someone close to the government is going to get very rich

If it is possible to check the digital ID against the central database of IDs, forgery would be harder.

Tony Blair and the Tony Blair institute have been pushing digital ID cards for years, unsurprising that his sons company is primed for this kind of work.

It stinks.

This is BIG news! So the company who will be providing the IDs has already been chosen. Talk about corruption.

There's a petition that reqires a parliamentry debate.
In China if you talk against the government you can't get on a train, you can't buy food or fuel.
Why should we hand a government the power to do this?

'Do not introduce digital ID cards' if anyone would care to sign it.

I’m fine without that. There’s things that I like for ease but as things are rn I don’t find anything onerous.

And not enough to pay for an expensive digital ID scheme which may use AI in some way for access.

Mine is really useful. I listed above the ways I use it daily. No taking a utility bill to prove ID etc. Everything is joined up. Though I hasten to add (again) not everything is in the same place

Basically Euan Blair couldn't get even our craven and hapless government to pay for his software bootcamp any more so we've got to award him a new beano.

There's already a right to work system www.gov.uk/view-right-to-work

Why are so many people so keen to say they have nothing to hide... this is about proving eligibility to work in this country.

I feel similarity when reading this but what is good about it? What will it do that’s useful?

As @Cleo65 says, there are already NI numbers in the UK.

Starmer has said that digital IDs could play an important part in making the UK less attractive to illegal migrants.

How is his scheme different to NI numbers or slightly adjusted NI?

If I were to employ someone illegally in the UK now I would, hypothetically, pay cash in hand and they would pay neither NI nor Income tax, be under the radar, and ineligible for a range of benefits. They are illegal.

Oh no, the Starmer card! I'm going to have to switch from what I am doing (hypothetically) to... oh scratch that.

Fine with me. Nothing to hide and frankly I find the “oooo no they are watching me” attitude a bit ridiculous. They have all your data anyway!

Always had an ID card in the European country I lived in for decades.

Take your tin foil hats off.

How would it be policed?

Please tell which services and how having a digital I.D will make it easier for me to access those services.

I already did a big post, but think centralised ID is a good thing if managed correctly. To cut down on fraud and benefit fraud, health tourism, illegal working etc. But it needs to be backed up with other processes to actually police this.

"Maybe you could detail all the personal freedoms that people in Iceland, Belgium, Finland or Spain have lost."

Maybe you could consider that for the people who don't want to have a digital ID linked to various aspects of their lives, being forced to by the government is itself a loss of freedom.

Maybe you might also like to consider that Britain is not Iceland, Belgium, Finland or Spain? That we're an entirely different country, culture, government and population and what happens in those countries don't automatically relate to what will happen in ours?

"We are not supposed to live like this."

I find myself thinking this exact same sentence on a regular basis these days @MrLarsonsNailGun

ID cards be useful especially when you are accessing healthcare and education....

But like all these things it's the cost at a time when we are meant to be prioritising.

I'm not worried about surveillance to be honest because that's already an issue with the tech we carry around

There is no compulsory 'digital ID' as such (but compulsory identification numbers that link up everything online) but in practice almost everyone uses digital ID via either their bank, mobile certificate, or an electronic ID card because you need to use them to identify yourself online for things like renewing your passport, booking appointments, accessing health records, accessing benefits portal, registering as unemployed etc. it is possible to do these things by paper forms but that's mostly foreigners who haven't been able to get a Finnish bank account yet, or the very elderly who can't manage online.

Do you mean Clearview? That did not comply with Finnish law, but they used it on advice of Europol, to try and find victims of CSE. Illegal, but not exactly an example of misuse with ill intent. And they stopped using it.

All my personal information is accessible via a single ID, but no single authority can access it all, they can only access information relevant to them, when allowed to do so.