Reposted from another thread:
It’s a huge privacy concern. People should be really worried about the drip drip drip loss of privacy and autonomy that we’ve all been sleep walking into and this is yet another step in the direction of us being constantly tracked and monitored. It’s incredibly dystopian. I am very disappointed by the Lib Dems considering dropping their opposition to ID cards just because Ed Davies had a little jolly to Estonia and they told him how brilliant it was and it had no impact on privacy….how naive of him.
Some people may be comfortable with the idea of the idea of ID cards now (personally I don’t have that much faith in either our government or our justice system but others may feel differently). But what about if a hard right (or indeed hard authoritarian left) government got into power. And that's far from off the cards in the current climate/unstable world we are living in. Would you be as happy with ID cards then? Privacy is more important than ever.
And you need to think about how they could be used in the future once the infrastructure is in place, not just what the government say they will be used for initially. It could, for example, be used to track us when we move throughout different areas of the country as they do in China, or it could be used to access ANY internet, thereby monitoring all of your online use. And probably in a million ways we haven't even thought of yet as we've seen with the ways that online companies such as Google are harvested and using/selling data. This is a huge threat to democracy especially if a government gets in that is more authoritarian - how will people resist if they can be tracked everywhere, doing everything? Remember the resistance in France during the war, how would they have done that with the tracking methods available now? What would have happened to Jews in the holocaust if the Nazis had had this power - many, many more would have not been able to get away and been killed. Privacy is not just for now, you need to think about what iff the worst happens and I have no privacy, what then?
Plus you need to think about what data will be collected and by who and how securely it will be stored. As an example, in the US currently. there are private companies running some of their traffic AI cameras (which is a whole other privacy discussion for another day!), they take and store that data and sell it on to other organisations; the feeds they transport the data across are also not secure. So who will be running the UK'd digital ID scheme? Is our personal information secure? What else is being done with our personal information? Even if it's not being sold on, the UK government themselves have allowed multiple large data breaches - data online is never 100% secure. The more data that's out there, the more is linked with other data, the more our security and privacy is at risk.
This (horrifyingly) sounds like some sort of crazy conspiracy, but it's not. Start researching it yourself. Look at what Europe are currently trying to bring in at the moment (search for "Chat control" if you want to be horrified), that the UK have shown an interest in. We are on the verge of slipping into the plot of a dystopian film, and we need to be working to move things back, bringing in better protections for UK citizens, not taking a further step in the wrong direction! Privacy is a right, you ca't have a democracy without privacy, and people should be able to choose who has their data, where it goes and understand exactly what's been done with it. We are a long way form that, but in the meantime let's not slip further int the quagmire. Say NO to Digital ID cards!!!!
If you are concerned and want to do more research, check out the following websites:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/
https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5669/blurring-line-how-militarisation-tech-reshaping-our-town-squares
https://www.eff.org/
You can support Big Brother Watch's campaign against digital here:
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campaigns/no2digitalid/
And please please write to your MP if you want to protest against Digital ID.