Digital ID

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer said:

Digitisation has already transformed so many parts of our lives – from how we shop, travel and bank.

But there’s so much more we can do to make people’s lives easier, simpler and more secure.

The digital ID is about putting power back in people’s hands, cutting the faff out of rummaging through drawers for documents and pointless bureaucracy we have accepted for too long while bringing Britain into the modern age.

This can be a boarding pass to getting on in life, helping people get a bank account, apply for a job or access childcare. Countries across the world are reaping the benefits of digital IDs, the British public should be able to as well.

Examples of how digital ID will make life easier include:

Social levelling: Giving everyone a form of photo ID for free, so those without passports or driving licences can open a bank account or get a job as easily as those that do.
Applying for a mortgage: Letting people prove who they are digitally instead of sending physical documents or paying for private verification services.
Renting a home: Making it possible for renters to prove their right to rent instantly, without hunting down old paperwork.
Protecting against fraud: Keeping identity information safe on your phone instead of relying on physical documents that can be lost or stolen.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-to-make-life-easier-for-millions

Honestly, who is he kidding?

How are people going to get this ID that haven't got passports and driving licences, surely not by knowing someone with a middle class job or a business owner for two years. Should be interesting.

What do you mean?

It's not about the digital ID, it's the next phase of bringing in CBDCs, so they can monitor your transactions.

Money is:

• Fiat ✅
• Digital ✅

Now just need to centralise it all and then add tracking, ie digital ID.

"If you have nothing to hide, then what's the issue?" Anyone who thinks like this should probably just hand over every last bit of freedom to the government now instead of waiting for the inevitable.

This is the point which seems absolutely mad and misguided

• Protecting against fraud: Keeping identity information safe on your phone instead of relying on physical documents that can be lost or stolen.

seriously? Like phones can’t be stolen, lost, or damaged beyond repair, and also are vulnerable to hacking.

An ID card would be a much more sensible option. A lot of adults already carry a driving license without problem. A card is imo more secure, robust and easily portable.

Genuine question. Social score? As it dystopian, Black Mirror territory?

The government is malicious, they'll bring in something they'll spin as good while having ulterior motives.

Example:

If digital is really going to solve mass immigration, and countries within the EU bloc already have established digital ID and 'it works well', then why, pray tell, is there still a massive issue with immigration in those countries?

I could then twist it to favour the left-wing:

People think they're going to be used by the benevolent Labour party to 'stop the boats'. If digital ID contains an individual's country of origin/nationality, and then say a 'far-right' government comes in, like Reform, Farage can then use the digital ID to round them all up and send them home.

Leaving aside the complete and utter impracticality of 'monitoring your transactions ' why would the government want to do that?

The police don't care if you're robbed or burgled, how and why will 'they' suddenly care if you buy a packet of fags or some chips?

They'll care about that you did at the bootfair where you sold some items to someone, so then they can tax you accordingly. No more bootfairs. They could say you've driven too many miles, or you've eaten too much meat, no more personal transportation or eating meat.

They ultimately don't want you using cash because the government can't trace it. And if you open a bitcoin account, you can bet the bank will open a money-laundering investigation on you.

The government does not want you having money. Or freedom.

I suggest you get off Facebook or whatever and think for yourself.

The government really couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. Every one of their IT projects is a total shitshow. They aren't going to track your car boot sales in a million years, it's completely bonkers

ABSOLUTELY 👏

I'm not comfortable with it. Stop snooping on our every fucking move. It's not North Korea or China?

Yep

Not seen Black mirror so can't comment directly. But yes dystopian, some invoicing is already stating carbon footprint for what reason I really do not know why, tie that to your personal ID it can be totalled and you can be denied; petrol, flights etc etc to change your behaviour, which is loss of choice / liberty. Bought to much alcohol against a limit set by who? Stop a transaction, etc, many companies can now pay to access your number plate info from a Govt data base and use that against you with little easy recourse to getting that corrected. That effect will grow and grow. If you ID gets cloned how do you prove you are who you are to get a reset and will that negative data truly be removed?

If digital id had been in place in 2020, the govt would almost certainly have used it to enforce lockdown, and probably to restrict purchases. Would we have wanted that?

But they had no problem really enforcing lockdown, what difference would a card have made?

As to purchases how do you imagine the government is going to implement a realtime database available in every shop, tied to your ID any time in the next thousand years?

How is the government going to 'tie's every purchase you make, in real time, against some imagined personal carbon allowance when they can't keep goverment departments go to date with something as simple as the previous version of windows?

It's completely barmy.

I don’t agree that they “had no problem enforcing lockdown”. The government had previously cut the police to the bone. Most of it was unenforceable: the government knew it, the police knew it, and a lot of the public knew it (those who did not succumb to the massive campaign of fear). The government used the media to make it look as if the police were lurking around every corner, with a few high-profile stories, such as the women persecuted for drinking coffee (and I call set-up on that one). The govt knew that lockdown relied on the public being sufficiently frightened.

It was easy to cheat the “pingdemic” process: give false details etc. But if digital ID had been linked to the app, it would have been harder.

Pre 2020, I might have thought digital id would be sensible. But now: nope, nope, nope.

But the lockdown worked because people believed in it (rightly or wrongly) not because of enforcement.

People mostly complied because it seemed like the right thing to do, that's why Johnsons parties hit so hard.

There are no where near enough police to enforce anything at all but it works because we have policing by consent not force.

It's just absurd to imagine some policed dystopia brought about by ID cards because there could be no enforcement even if the state wanted to do it, which they don't.

Please check out "How do Chinese Social Credits work" using your search engine of choice. You will find that most of my points are already being delivered, extension of those is very easy. UK Govt can't do things like windows upgrades because of the way UK dept budgets work. But when the central Govt contracts out centralised data bases to non Govt suppliers for a fixed contracted period against budgets fixed against things like delegated authority to spend on fixed performance, they can work very well. There is no legacy issue to fix on a new central system. The risk lies in the security and functionality of the systems that access them and there in lies a large potential for yet another security breach, but the central systems carry on compiling data which can then get misused.

The post above was for you.

I do know quite a lot about China, we have friends who've recently come back and who were there all through COVID so I have heard first hand about the repression there.

The important point is China is a long standing, ruthless, one-party police state with more than a million people in prison and the uk is none of those things.

China could abolish it's ID card tomorrow (if it has one, I really don't know) and it would make no difference to it's repression.

The ID card is not the issue just as it's not an issue in any western european country where they already have them.