Mandatory Digital ID

[RedToothBrush]

Anyone spot the U-turn?

Digital ID would have meant a show down over sex / gender amongst other issues....

You can ask your GP practice not to upload your records to whatever they are calling Spine these day.

The intolerance towards sex realist devs doesn't stop them from spotting a bad idea when they see it. The whole of IT is poisoned by genderism, because it's a male-dominated space.

This

They've been welcoming & promoting lousy ideas for so long now that "free & open source" has become synonymous with "credulous, bullying feckwits".

Not quite sure what "uploading" records even means.

My GP can't see my hospital records. Hospital A can't see hospital B records. Neither Hospital A or B or my GP can see my opticians records. My NHS "app" can't see the details in the NHS Trusts Hospital B "app".

And that's before you learn than Hospital A's booking system isn't actually used by the Ophthalmology department. Which you only discover when you call the phone number on the appointment letter to be told "Who the fuck are you ?"

I guess that is a long winded way of saying for the love of god get what shit you already have to work properly before you try and spunk untold billions on more.

It's called "summary care records" system and you have to opt-out if you don't want your records in it.

And yes to not adding more complexity to already broken stuff.

Cloudflare's 2025Q4 outages were nothing to do with the FLOSS community, they were errors by Cloudflare employees.

The domain-specific knowledge is about software systems. They know this stuff well. They don't know criminology. I don't pay attention to their opinions on who does sex offending to who, but I heed their opinions on software.

But I haven't opted out, and no one ever finds my "records" in any location.

I have had to carry my notes from one hospital to another.

Just like people blindly trusted the state about Covid and started tons of “Should I report my neighbour?” threads. There’s a very pro-surveillance and pro-police state contingent in the UK now.

Yup. I suppose our main protection is state inefficiency. I think what Labour ministers, who mostly aren't very tech literate, have in mind is a simple app like they use to order pizzas.

Based on what large government IT projects are actually like, it would more likely be a mega-DVLA that would take 20 years and a couple of hundred billion quid to set up, and even then wouldn't work.

No government IT project has ever come in on time or budget or worked.

Universal Credit, anyone ?
Post Office Horizon.

As the old saying goes, you can pick two of good, cheap and on time!

Countries like China and N Korea.
Digital ID is easier to forge than actual passports and visas put into passports.

They cancelled it because they piloted digital ID on immigrants in place of their biometric residence permit cards and the whole eVISA digital ID thing is an utter failure which they are likely to roll back.

It’s not the state though, it’s the contractor they hire to do the IT project. Profit over performance everytime.

Most people's records upload, unless they opt-out. Your records not uploading demonstrates why Govt IT systems are a joke.

I carry the receipt for my car tax in my glove box in case the police can't find my car on the DVLA database.

Were not.
The digital id was going to link to 1 massive database that held all.of your information including medical records, tax information, criminal records, passport and visa information, NI numbers, child benefit and anything else the government holds on you! Add to that the racial recognition cameras that the police are setting up would be linked to it aswell.

I don’t get these OPs.

Do they start the thread to debate the issue with other posters? Or to sit and read other posters debate the issue but not have anything to say on the matter themself?

The police now trust the MIDB over paper (which makes sense).

There have been cases of people having their car impounded despite showing their insurance certificate because "computer says no".

Last time I was given a courtesy car while mine was being repaired, I checked https://www.askmid.com/askmidenquiry.aspx and the car they were going to give me showed up as uninsured. After a rather worrying series of escalated phone calls (indicated that the people in the dealership knew fuck all), head office agreed to call and pay for a cab.

It is an offence to drive an uninsured car regardless of whether you know or not, and I wasn't going to risk my licence because somebody said it "should" be fine.

I'm sceptical, but hopefully it'll fuck off into the wilderness for another decade, until the PTB magic up another reason as a front to push it.
Triggernometry from 09/2025 but still pertinent, is very informative of the UK Civil Liberties campaign group, Big Brother Watch.

I carry the paper and I also check that the DVLA database shows the right thing after I've paid it. The paper is to give me something with which to say "are you sure the computer is correct?" in the case of an IT glitch.

I'm just so tired of the machinations of this government.www.gbnews.com/politics/keir-starmer-s-digital-id-cards-will-not-let-britons-say-if-they-re-male-or-female Keir Starmer's digital ID cards will not let Britons say if they are male or female Sir Keir Starmer's new digital identity cards will not say whether the holder is male or female, GB News can disclose.The news led the Tories to claim that "having struggled for so long to define what a woman is, Labour have now decided it’s easier just to abolish the concept entirely", adding that "women deserve better than to have their existence erased".

UK government opens consultation on digital ID scheme share.google/LbkzNVdwOp4DYmNgz

The consultation closes at 12:30 pm on 5 May 2026
Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who now sits as an independent, added: "This is ludicrous."Polls show that many people are against the concept of digital ID as they are concerned about the Government holding a huge amount of very personal data centrally without full accountability about the possible sharing of sensitive and potentially commercially valuable information."But the idea that one of the most fundamental and basic identifiers, a person's biological sex, would not even be recorded and used to identify them, makes a farce of the whole idea and renders it a completely pointless scheme."

Ah. Like the census. Amazingly expensive and time consuming - at a time in history when neither is to spare in this country - and merely a vanity project.