As well as the Estonia eID system works (aside from that time it got hacked[0] and that other time they leaked all the photos[1]) and how well a digital (non-government) system works in Scandinavia… I have to say…
As a Dual British/Swedish Citizen, I really do not trust the UK government. They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
So, no matter if it’s a good idea or not. I can’t in good faith advise the UK having more powers. Unfortunately the UK government themselves can sort of just grant themselves more power. So…
I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Some have explained it with a lack of trust between citizens and the country.
But without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services as we have here. The government services need to verify and autheticate the citizen, so they only access their own data and not someone who has the same name and birth date by accident.
I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers. It already has all the data on its citizens, but it is spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions, maybe some of it is stored in databases where no one cares about security, etc.
When the state is more likely to cause you problems than help you out, you want them to be bad at it. The corrupt cop going on a fishing expedition to try to bust you for something because you're dating his ex, who can't find anything because it's "spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions" -- that's what you want to happen.
It's also not just about the government. If you give everyone a government ID which is easy to use over the internet, private companies will then demand that you use it over the internet and use it as a tracking ID. Which is the evil to be inhibited.
The UK government has justified this with reducing the amount of illegal workers. To work legally currently you need an NI number, this is not an improvement on that system other than requiring everyone to have a phone (probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom).
I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".
More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.
There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.
Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.
The crackdown on immigrants is just an excuse. The real reason is different, the government is out of money and it doesn't believe most of the current welfare bill goes to people in genuine need. (Hence why the previous misadventures of a left-wing government involved 2 attempts at cutting welfare - first the winter bonus for pensioners, then a type disability payments).
The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.
Most pensioners don't need financial help. The fuel allowed was introduced by Gordon Brown when they were the poorest cohort in the country. Now they are they amount the most well off. Pensioners that need it still get it.
Strangely there was no fuss when universal child benefit was taken away in 2015 (or maybe later I forget). The media was full of stories about how rich people were getting £20 a week when they didn't need it.
Now apparently pensioners that have a larger income than most working families are desperate for the fuel allowance and they will be freezing to death without it. Its nonsense.
>probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom
And they can, forgive me for my rather vulgar language, fuck right off with this thinking. Problem is it will still go into place, because for most people giving up the right of being able to govern their own device that they paid for is not a problem for whatever reason. Neither will it be until it touches something that is important to them - that's when, hopefully, some more people will be able to see that we are rapidly spiralling downwards toward a complete techno-authoritarian dystopia.
>given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
A protest group attacked a military base causing £millions of damage. They got censured, as a terrorist organisation.
"Protestors" decided they wanted to support that specific organisation, taking focus away from their message and chasing after something the government simply can't countenance: allowing protestors to ruin our defensive capabilities, at immense expense to the taxpayer, just to make some headlines.
If these people cared about Palestinians then they should have given up supporting the proscribed 'terrorists' and protested in a way that didn't require the government to crack down hard. Plenty of other non-proscribed protest groups are perfectly allowed.
Private corporation's already know everywhere you go, if you have a mobile phone, or use a debit/credit card, or drive a car. The government already know where you work and when, if you pay your taxes.
What Reform/Tories/right-wingers didn't want was any solution that would ease the problems they're using to try and rile the people into full culture wars. Labour are giving them what they [say they] want: making it harder for illegal immigrants, making it harder to claim benefits. But Farage isn't really there to solve a problem, here's there to create one as a means to weadle into power (presumably so he can refuse to do any useful work with that power, as he did in the EU) so he can fuck up the UK trying to be Trump 2 Fascist Boogaloo.
It's messed up that they wasted millions of pounds that should have been sent to israel instead. If they were really serious about their cause, they should have protested in a manner that is convenient for me and totally harmless
Terrorism is targeting civilians or civilian infrastrucure to further a political goal.
Terrorism have a bad rep, but it was used successfully in South africa to remove apartheid, with the French resistance and a lot of anti-colonization movement. Targeting fuel depots and the Crimea bridge can also be considered terrorism (and is, by the russian).
I personnally think we ought to distinguish terrorism which mostly target civilians from terrorism on which civilan death are side-effect, but the US state department calling terrorists people who only killed military targets during the Irak/Afghanistan war diluted the meaning of the word further. I'm trying to push back on that, because when the meaning of terrorism is diluted enough, it stop to be a good word to describe a phenomenon we ought to stop, and start to be a word used by politician to target what they don't like.
In glad you used scare quotes around the word "terrorists", suggesting you are as cynical about this absurd misuse of the term as the rest of us. That's the actual issue here. Yes, PA's acts of civil disobedience should be punished according to law, but classing an organisation as "terrorist", based on one (?) incident that appears to have spread literally zero terror, is appalling behaviour from a pitiful, authoritarian government.
Russia also have very good digital services. Now in one go government can send you conscription notification and immediately block your from leaving country as well as revoke driver license, block your banks and even phone numbers.
Also since all the data available about you in one place any malicious actor who can bribe someone with access can immediately get all your data: passport info and tax id, addresses, work history, all cars and all owned properties, everything.
Having centralized system with information about everything can very easily be used for oppression.
> Also since all the data available about you in one place
Note that having a 'Digital ID' and 'all the data available about you in one place' are two completely different things. You can have a electronic ID system and separated specialized systems. In fact I think Germany is going in this direction, also giving the citizens the ability to request deletion of all information held about them in a particular system.
The judicial system is the one who is supposed to prevent abuses of power like this. What you are proposing is essentially security through obscurity, if the data is fragmented all over the place on different institutions it is really hard to be exploited in the government, but still totally can be.
Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to (please don't bring up blockchain, it can be done without it). The technology exists.
Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.
> Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to
The countries that these discussions are about (the UK and RU, with the subtext of the US) have not demonstrated that their legislators are trustworthy enough to implement digital ID in a privacy-preserving. Unless and until that happens, then discussion of it is off the table. When you advocate for a thing being implemented, you are implicitly advocating for its current real-world implementations.
> Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.
My point was the government can still totally track you as an individual, the data is just fragmented all over the place. But if you are high profile the government can totally put some investigator to track down everything.
This kind of security benefits the general population against mass-scale crackdowns (like dodging conscription in Russia) of course, but it can still be weaponized against individuals (like journalists, dissidents, political opposition). Which are the main people who needs this kind of data-protection.
As if this wasn't possible before digital ID was introduced. The only difference was that you got a conscription notice after you tried to leave and realised that you can't.
I really doubt that. America's Congress seems to have very little difficulty in debanking people all across Europe, and obviously, they have no access to any European identity system. Canada infamously froze the bank accounts of anyone donating to anti-government protest movements and it's one of the nations without a comprehensive identification system.
KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.
I agree with what you say, but I still think people should push back on this. It shouldn't be convenient for governments to abuse their citizens.
However, a bad actor (depends on how well funded/connected they are) would still have a harder time getting information.
As for the KYC thing, right now it's mostly to ensure you're not funding terrorist/criminal enterprises (at least it was the case for one of my previous companies). The data isn't just readily available to any political party who asks for it (I guess most companies will comply under certain conditions, but the legal friction is the point I think).
Exceptionally good. Sometimes I even think it's worth it.
Need a specific statement or a document - here you have it in PDF in 2 minutes in an android app with somewhat decent usability.
The only saving grace for us is incompetence. Tyrannies breed incopmetence in goverments since competent people are able to ask troubluing questions. At least I hope so.
The only problem is that any scammer who can pay $100-200 bribe can reset your password without you there and immediately get all these PDFs, then mess up your whole life.
I'm somewhat indifferent to the concept of a Digital ID. The problem is that the UK government's reason for introducing it doesn't make sense - to 'solve' illegal workers, when the UK already has a (digital) system for proving right to work https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
I'm somewhat indifferent to the concept of a Digital ID. The problem is that the UK government's reason for introducing it doesn't make sense - to 'solve' illegal workers, when the UK already has a (digital) system for proving right to work
I saw some British politicians discussing this on Sky last week, and I really don't see the point of the British digital ID.
They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things. It wasn't spelled out how having yet another number will make things better.
My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns. But a number is a number. Why yet another number?
And the whole thing about having a number will somehow stop people from working illegally seems like a red herring. I believe Brits already have to have a national insurance number in order to work. That hasn't stopped people from working illegally. They talking heads didn't explain what's so magical about this new number that will suddenly do things that the old number or numbers didn't.
/Not a Brit. Just bewildered by what appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
> They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things.
They don't have a national ID system though. Having a lot of different ID systems that are IDing other things for other purposes doesn't address this.
> My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns.
I don't know how this works in the UK but I do know a bit about how this works in other jurisdictions. The data in the current systems are there because there is a law that says what data is collected and for what purpose. You can't lawfully use it for a different purpose (there might be a loophole for public safety or whatever, but that would be an exception). Your organisation would break the law and the bosses could go to jail. But also, it was designed for one purpose and if you tried to use it for a different one, you would run into a lot of data quality issues.
Sky is a really right wing partisan channel though, ofc they are going to say negative things about the incumbent government or basically anything it does.
Not to say the idea is good or bad, but how people watch hyper-partisan media and draw any conclusions from it is beyond me.
> Sky is a really right wing partisan channel though, ofc they are going to say negative things about the incumbent government or basically anything it does
You are pretending as if Sky is like Fox News in the UK. It is more like a slightly right of centre network.
Sky didn't say anything. The two talking heads from two different political parties said things.
As an outsider, I have no idea if Sky News is "right wing" or not. I watch Sky and BBC because those are the two British services I can get where I am.
(And occasionally ITV, but it seems to be all potatoes, and no meat.)
I note that instead of addressing the topic of discussion, you deflect into another topic. Why is that?
Sure, but it’s not like there media outlets just select any old person to discuss any old topic. They can choose who they want to be the mouthpiece for a certain topic and make sure they get plenty of airtime to say whatever is required…
Legally they have to provide "Due Impartiality" on the TV network. So they normally invite several people so they can claim they have provided balance.
I actually don't like that they are legally required they do this as often it becomes a shouting match between two participates. I want to hear someone's argument in full.
As a Canadian-American living in Denmark, I've seen both sides of this. In short: trust and mistrust are _both_ self-reinforcing concepts.
To take an example - would I want the current US government to be better at compiling information across all its agencies / departments? Absolutely not. What it does with its current level of consolidation is authoritarian enough that I'm not moving back there any time soon. I hear similar sentiments from my Hungarian colleagues, who are quite familiar with competitive authoritarianism in their own country.
Of course, this mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. I don't trust the US government, so I want it to be bad at its job - but then it's bad at its job, so I see it as ineffective and bloated and continue to mistrust it.
IMHO the only way out of this spiral is the hard way: a system must do the hard work to show itself trustworthy, and it must do so _before_ people will entrust it with the information that would make the job of being trustworthy easier. As with human relationships, it takes a _lot_ more work to repair trust than it does to break it. Unlike with human relationships, you also have systemic factors: the system needs an unbroken series of good, principled leaders; it needs to visibly and credibly punish corruption, not turn a blind eye; it needs to de-escalate divisions, not inflame them; it needs various institutional safeguards to work properly, not chop away at them; it needs to allow meaningful dissent and criticism, not crack down on it; it needs to learn from expertise, not undermine it.
Most importantly: the system needs to learn from its failures, and adjust the rules and incentives of the system itself to prevent those failures from recurring. This is generational work.
> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
It depends on the country and its relationship with the people. If the people trust that their government represents the people's interests, there is little push-back. In countries where citizens have reason to believe their government is hijacked by interests that do not have their best interests at heart, then every move is viewed with suspicion.
In this case people are tying Digital ID to CBDCs and social credit systems, which is a reasonable thing to do, given this is exactly how China uses them to enforce 15-minute cities with checkpoints between them. All citizens conversations are tracked, their movements are restricted as well [1], and their ability to purchase goods & services are tightly regulated based on their behavior via the social credit system. This is the world that people who are pushing back against this are trying to avoid.
Wow, crazy seeing the "15 minute city" conspiracy theory on HN! For those who haven't seen it, the idea of 15 minute cities is that a lot of people think it would be great to structure development of cities with the ideal of a person being able to access most of the services they want to (workplaces, schools, supermarkets, doctors) within 15 minutes (whether walking, cycling, using public transit etc.) of where they live. It's basically a target for how easily you should be able to access services without needing to travel far, and a push-back of massive suburbs zoned solely as single-family housing that force you to drive a long way to get to anything.
The more conspiratorial among us have baselessly decided the idea of "hey it would be great to build schools and things near where people live" must actually be a globalist plot to restrict people's movement to within 15 minutes of their home. It's wild!
If you are going to mock conspiracy theorists can you at least articulate the conspiracy theory correctly.
People are worried that it would be made difficult for you to travel outside 15 minute city via a combination of mandated digital payment system for all transactions that are tied to you identity and removal of personal vehicles (e.g. cars).
e.g. Person A is allowed by authorities to buy a train ticket, while Person B is not due to <arbitrary criteria>.
I've been told this has been done in China to stop people travelling to protests, but I don't actually know if that is true.
Do I think this is the intention behind 15 minute cities? No. I do however think that what they are describing is possible since I've had problems making transactions electronically for legal purchases because my transaction was flagged by the bank for being fraudulent.
Also in the UK the bank can refuse to give you your money.
I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.
I have my doubts that China, which has many of the densest cities in the world, would get much mileage (pun intended) out of restricting travel to try to quell protests. They have tons of cities that each have millions of residents. If the CPC manages to piss off a significant fraction of the populace to the point where they’re interested in marching down the street demanding regime change, there will be enough of them in those cities that no amount of travel restrictions is going to matter.
Arguably much more important would be that I don’t think most people in China own any significant weapons, and we’ve seen decades ago how shy that government isn’t about just running people over with tanks until protests dissipate.
> I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.
I never said it was part of a government conspiracy. What I am saying is that your ability to transact freely is infringed by opaque mechanisms.
If that is added with digital only payments which is tied to your gov id, it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where your ability to transact freely be taken away to stop you from travelling for political reasons.
It’s not a social credit system because it doesn’t weight your social involvement in the society (political party, school credentials, race) but rather payment history, amount of debt, types of credit
Not at all. It is simply a score based on your ability to manage credit, it is scored differently based on the company making the assessment.
In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.
There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.
It doesn’t inherently have to do with wealth and class, however, all of these things are so tightly correlated that it loses barely any fidelity and just saves you a little bit of time to assume that someone with an 815 credit score is law-abiding, upper-middle or high social class, and has a medium to high net worth, and that somebody with a 550 credit score is at least one of the following: poor, criminal history, and a low social class.
None of this should be that surprising: it’s hard to make all of your debt payment payments on time if you’re either broke or in jail.
No having a high credit score has nothing do with your wealth or social class. I have worked in this industry briefly. It looks at your ability to manage credit, and whether you have any flags.
e.g. I had a 995 credit score on Experian back in the late 2000s. The highest was 999. I earned £18,000 at the time, and was in my mid-20s and didn't really own anything at the time. I did have a credit card at the time where I made the payments, and I lived at a household which had no debt, and I was on the electoral roll.
That is why when you are making larger purchases they do a "means test" e.g. see if you earn enough to pay a mortgage.
Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race. This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
Your comment is a great example of "If you assume, it makes an ass out of u and me".
Everything about this reply is completely incorrect.
> Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
So you made a bunch of assumptions about my personal circumstances. Let me correct you:
- I didn't "Game the system". I had absolutely no idea at the time such a thing as a credit score existed. I cannot game a system when I have no idea that it exists. The only reason I checked is that other people at work were checking theirs and I did so sheerly out of curiosity. Many years later I happened to work a contract where they wrote software that did the credit checks.
- I was not "living on the ropes". I lived within my means.
- I had 2-3 months of savings. My strategy for saving this money was to save it on payday. So I forgot I had the money and couldn't spend it. I do exactly the same thing now.
- The debt I had on my credit card was paid off in full monthly. I only used it for online purchases (many online sites didn't take debit cards still).
> Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race.
Again I did not game the system. I was completely financially illiterate at the time. My only financial literacy, I had at time was that I shouldn't spend all my money after payday and I shouldn't spend more money than I had. I found that out in the first month of living on my own. My family actually earn a lot less than I do now.
None of this has anything to do with race. From reading your comments replying to me and your posting history, I am pretty sure you are from the US. You are applying your US centric view of the world onto the UK. The UK is not the US.
> This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
What you are trying to do is to erroneously shoehorn in your brand of US politics into a discussion about the UK. As a result of this you have got everything about my personal circumstances (at the time) and the circumstances of family and wider community completely incorrect, in an attempt to score some political points (it obvious btw from the language you are using).
I suggest in future you shouldn't make assumptions.
Because there is already a barrier to prevent that. Defaulting on the home loan or not paying rent and facing eviction. Having a barrier based on past behavior is stupid. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Funny how that works for investment banks to cover their ass but they can't see how it might also apply to individuals.
I realize that you responded to a specific statement, not necessarily the entire context of the thread. However:
Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).
In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.
Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).
One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).
This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.
This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
> This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
It maybe doesn’t adress the point you’re interested in, but it doesn’t miss the point I was making, that the goals and mechanisms revolves around how well a person manages credit. For the credit provider everything else is secondary or irrelevant, including whether it’s because you’ve made poor decisions or external factors have screwed you over.
> Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
This is probably the crux of why we’re not on the same page, because I don’t understand what this means. I’m genuinely asking, what do you mean when you say that they treated it as a social credit score marker? What business did you have with them (or they with you) that didn’t involve whether or not to extend credit? What does the term “social credit score marker” mean to you?
> This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
I don’t see how you explain that it’s a fallacy, and I don’t think it is, but I concede that it’s a confusing word choice - I should probably have just omitted the word “uncaring”. My point was once again that their sole goal is determining the risk of extending a person credit - whether that would be a nice or moral thing to do or not doesn’t factor into it.
> We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
I assume here that you mean that people’s financial status, including their access to credit, determines a lot of aspects of their lives, too (correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with that. I do however think that you underestimate how constraining it can be when additional variables are factored in to more directly control what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and how.
UK credit score system don't even have "nationality" in it so not discriminating non-citizens that much. Neither it hold any ID card or passport numbers.
Yeah there is electoral roll, but you can still access credit without being on it and afaik all residents of scotland are on it since even non citizens can vote in local election.
And unlike US there not even a "score" number since lenders only get records but not some magical number. Whatever credit agencies sell you as credit score is just random number they come up with and it's not being used by lenders btw.
Seems like a red-herring. Does a government need a digital ID to do that? Many do that with the "free market" of publicly-tradable information + pre-existing government IDs already used for certain things. I don't know for sure how much the UK government is purchasing all that, but there's a lot of cameras and tech tracking in the country already, like those of us across the pond also are watched with.
It won't reverse surveillance states but fraud is also a huge problem that deserves addressing.
Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.
A central ID enforced on all systems by statute would significantly reduce the barrier to creating “airtight” oppressive systems. While the inefficiencies in the US system have a cost, certainly preventing the implementation of more efficient social benefit programs, they also provide a barrier against more efficient social repression. Given the political animosity present in the country right now, it’s probably good that we don’t have the ability to create a turnkey totalitarian system. Things are bad enough as is!
More generally, in nations where the population feels suspicion towards their politicians and bureaucrats, the people may prefer to leave inefficiencies baked into the system in order to hamper potential oppression. Those social tensions and trust deficits should be resolved before proceeding with any ambitious central ID schemes.
US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier).
This is a feature, not a bug.
Even though we're only at the very beginning of the various U.S. systems being merged, we're already seeing it being abused.
(One example: States using license plate reader data to prosecute women for getting abortions in other jurisdictions.)
Honestly with things like abortion, where there are sincerely held beliefs with good points on both sides of it, I think it would be less work for literally everyone to truly leave it to the states and everybody just moves to the nearest or most convenient state that aligns with their values. I’m so sick of this one issue being a perennial divisive force. Both sides have a point. Go live wherever you agree with the policies. And if the blue states want to operate abortion clinics for runaway teens from red states that’s fine, then they can also build dorms for them and pay for them to stay there. Red states can do the opposite and build state-sponsored birthing centers and pay for childcare for the runaway teens from blue states whose parents want to force them to terminate.
Please read comments in full before replying to them:
> US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification.
Please understand that supposedly poor data quality is not a defence against an authoritarian country wanting to implement a social credit system.
Some national ID system won't make such ambitions significantly easier, but lack of such a system causes exactly the issues you quoted.
So is this hypothetical social credit system in the hands of an incompetent government worth it all? Over identity theft and the multi-billion industry around it?
And yet authoritarian countries without such central ID have historically had to use other less targeted methods of oppression, which creates pushback and dissent within the population, leading to either the downfall of the government or intensive reforms. The threat of a “clean” system of oppression is that it will only catch actual dissidents, without sweeping in innocents. This could freeze out any chance of effective opposition.
The most effective 20th century totalitarian states, such as the East German DDR, issued ID numbers to its citizens, along with ID cards that citizens were required to carry at all times. This greatly helped the security services coordinate the oppression of suspected radicals, but without modern computer systems it relied too heavily on human efforts. It eventually faced its limits against rising dissent and it could not prevent the downfall of the government. A computerized Stasi would be much more terrifying.
One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing. Immigration officials are facing serious roadblocks in rounding up and processing suspected undocumented immigrants, and mistakes in this process are creating widespread pushback. Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent. And the lack of a unified system of oppression means that even targets of the state can often find ways to continue living in between the cracks, and they are not totally frozen out. In many ways it’s not a great system, certainly far from perfect, but the many flaws serve an important purpose in the face of systemic oppression. Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
If you live in a high trust society, you may not get it. The mutual animosity in the US is such that we have government officials talking about “national divorce” and otherwise average people joking about political murder. I know the UK is not quite as bad off, but I understand that it is quickly moving in that direction. That’s no time to introduce new potential mechanisms of oppression.
> One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing.
You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
That's why it can be stolen, that's why "identity theft" is a multi-billion dollar thing. Thats why you keep your SSNs and I guess also CC#s rather tightly guarded.
> Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent.
There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
> Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
I rather think it lulls you into a false sense of safety. Inefficiency in existing "numbering systems" can be overcome with resources. You truly do not lack an ID system, a number, computerization nor identity that could protect you.
A lack of one number is not really protection against any of that.
> You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
My exact point, glad we agree. Very cumbersome indeed, and not centralized enough to use for turnkey totalitarianism. (Slow, plodding, inefficient totalitarianism, sure. But see my above post for why that isn’t as much of an existential threat.)
> There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
False. Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives. It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.
Nothing prevents oppression of individuals today, true. It’s a question of scale and accuracy. What we need to defend against is a system where oppression can be quickly, efficiently, and accurately targeted towards large groups. That’s the essence of turnkey totalitarianism. It can’t be built without a centralized ID system that’s applied consistently across other key systems. Current systems do not do this.
Myths about the US system:
* Every citizen has an SSN
* Every citizen uses the same name when dealing with different agencies and private businesses
* A person’s SSN always remains the same
* Citizens don’t register different addresses when dealing with different agencies and private businesses
* Government agencies use SSN as a primary key
* Agencies and businesses have a centralized, highly accurate way to determine who is deceased
* All citizens have a REAL ID license/ID
* All citizens have a license/ID
I hope this gives you a sense of how the US approaches ID. It’s extremely messy. Yes this enables things like identity fraud, guarding against this is part of the cost of our safeguards against totalitarianism. A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.
> Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives.
I don't think a totalitarian government cares much about false positives though.
> It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.
I also don't think that bunch of different places to turn off someone's ability to participate in a society is a meaningful difference in practice. Even if it takes slightly longer or has false positives like you describe, it still achieves the totalitarian goal.
> A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.
I unfortunately struggle to see the results of this sacrifice to be honest.
This reply tells me you haven’t read or understood my post above. Historically, inefficient totalitarianism is self-defeating, as its oppressive acts create constant friction and sweep up innocent bystanders, creating resentment among the population. This eventually builds to an explosive release.
Technologically modernized totalitarianism may be able to implement large-scale oppressive policies without affecting most of the population. In fact the average person may see a net benefit! This would create a more stable society despite the significantly lower level of freedom and self-determination. We may be witnessing the development of this sort of system in China, for example. The average person benefits, but a segment of the population faces brutal oppression with no recourse and must simply submit. (Contrast with the US, where people who face repression can sometimes start over by going dark and moving across the country.)
I read it and I think I understood it. But I disagree on the premise. I don't find that inefficiency is needed, protective or preventative.
I find it more likely that a totalitarian system that doesn't tolerate wrong-think will inherently start accumulating inefficiencies among other things. Which can then end up with the collapse of such a regime.
Building a technologically modernized authoritarian state might increase stability for a while, but not thinking is simply not competitive long-term. Unless you achieve total world domination, I guess.
Then I suppose I’m just less willing to risk tyranny through removing potential barriers. The best protection against a massive, complex system being wielded by evildoers is to never build the system properly in the first place.
While they may be able to gain power initially, would-be totalitarians will likely be fighting off multiple threats while they consolidate power. The more they have to manage and spend, the less likely they will be to succeed at their aims. You could argue that the DOGE debacle is the most recent and obvious example of this. All indications are that the project failed, and it occupied quite a lot of energy and effort during the critical transitional period of the administration.
> Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.
IMO this is another non-sequitor.
Let's say you had a digital ID in the form of a smart card for your SSN with a USB connection that was required to be plugged in when you auth'd to a government website to file your taxes. No new number would be required for a digital ID card in the US. Tax return fraud to get people's refund sent to someone else, though? Probably down! Does everyone have an SSN? Who cares, let's improve things for the vast-majority case where we have an extremely insecure little piece of paper.
That smart card doesn't magically reconcile and rationalize the sprawling hodgepodge of government systems.
Or, let's go the other way: not having a digital ID card does not prevent the government from rationalizing and tying all those systems together.
You might look back to the recent past when the executive branch sending employees to all those disparate agencies to grab that data and make changes to those systems! They didn't need a new digital ID to do that, and they wouldn't need a new digital ID to improve the use of SSN-as-PK-for-cross-system-joins.
Being more rigorous about tracking the existing numbers already assigned to you does not require smarter, cryptographically-sound, identification tokens. And those tokens do not require the government improve their processes for connecting things *after the "give us your SSN for identification" of their various separate web-based services (or the non-government entities that also use those SSNs) that people love to abuse for fraud.
Nor does any of this make it easier or harder for the government to take "absence of evidence of identity or citizenship" as "evidence of absence of identity or citizenship" - if you fit the non-citizen profile, the burden's already on you to prove it, and what makes you so sure that the courts wouldn't happily let this or a future administration expand the boundaries for "we picked you up because we were suspicious, now YOU have to prove who you are if you ever want to get out" regardless of if a digital ID card exists?
In the US we use a short number written on a paper card - social security numbers. It's a huge source of compromised security on every level from government services to corporate to personal data security.
Problem with a digital ID is that I don't want to use it beyond government service. But now there is discussion that people need to identify themselves for any and all online services.
If an ID is proliferated the legislative change to force ID checks is minimal. If it weren't just Estonia and government ID would be more widely spread, it would take less than 24h for the EU to enforce borders online.
I’d point out that the privilege to break the law simply “because online” is a pretty new thing. People in 1980 couldn’t automatically conduct transactions that were illegal, and access materials, their government deemed illegal, etc. If a book was banned in your country, it was likely just not available for you.
I really think people need to stop believing that the Internet solves all the problems of sovereign states doing anti-freedom things. That’s a part of life, and enabling people to evade laws, which may indeed be democratically voted upon, is not an automatic virtue. I don’t even think laws get changed because of this type of evasion, it just makes citizens more complacent about the laws that get passed because they know they can evade them anyway, but also it means most everyone is technically a criminal. Does anybody think people in those states that outlawed Internet porn stopped consuming it? But how many people are doing anything to change those laws? I don’t think very many. They’re just using a VPN. So the problem of oppressive laws isn’t being solved this way.
Just like Britons can’t imagine Estonia, I know you can’t imagine Britain.
In the UK there’s a bunch of government and company databases, and coalescing them isn’t just hard, in some cases it’s not even possible.
You can ask a company for specific details on a person, and they can make a “reasonable effort” to get the data. But if they mishandle the request (maybe your name has accents?) then the government gets no information.
The easier it gets, the easier it can be for them to excercise power over you, and right now there’s sufficient reason to be worried about that. The current government is liberally using the fascistic powers that the previous government created.
Good thing no one asked us about the digital identity when they implemented it.
It makes a difference as much as electronic money does. So instead of having to physically be able to pay someone we can transfer it, pay by debit card and lots of other ways now.
With digital identity we get the same - we can do paperwork remotely and securely.
Well people in Germany are also slow to get away with physical money and they are miles behind in digital services, so... some still enjoy the snail speed of everything (or not).
Meh, instead of days of paperworks, we can sell a car remotely (paperwork-wise). I tick some checkbox in my phone, the buyer ticks and off he goes - he has X number of days to acquire new technical passport for car and that's it. Also can be mailed if he wishes so.
Nevada's DMV is a great example what happens without eID. Agencies that have a better idea about people's identity have been forced to do things like background checks and fingerprinting. Your data eggs in one basket, or a few.
If you attack the DMV in a country that has working eID it will only affect the DMV. Maybe you can't sign up for a driving exam or order new plates. That's it. It won't affect the police in cases that don't concern the DMV (like insurance) and vice versa. Sure if you attack everything at once everything will be affected, that's always an option, eID or not.
Fundamentally a digital ID does not mean a single "basket", just that wherever those "eggs" are that you know it's one single "chicken". That "chicken" can also have multiple ways of identifying themselves (including offline methods). That's how it is in countries that have a working eID implemented.
Governments change. Any group in society has the potential to become marginalized, and if all services are funneled through a single system it becomes very easy to selectively switch off access.
> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Imagine if you were a large country, say 10x to 100x larger. Your government would be equally more resourced and probably have more hands controlling more parts of your business and lives. This is where digital id becomes a scarier prospect. This is where opportunity and ability finally collude.
Imagine a Russia-friendly party getting elected. Doesn't have to be overtly pro-russian. Can be someone very nationalist like Marine Le Pen in France. Or socialist like Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany. Just someone with financially dependent on Russia, or simply owing them favour.
Now imagine them accidentally leaving some loophole in the system, such that Russians get read or maybe even write access to data.
If they get elected they can fuck everyone over the exact same way.
The fact that there's something akin to a unique identifier or that it has a corresponding certificate or some means for authentication will and does not stop any malicious government. Never has, has it?
The thing is, to me, the powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID. We already have to identify ourselves in a variety of circumstances (e.g. mortgages, bank accounts, voting, using "adult" websites etc), and the gov. can get the information from various third parties on demand already.
Implementing those requirements didn't depend on there being a digital ID system. Instead we have a hodge podge of bad requirements (like "wet" signatures on specific documents, using of non-UK based private providers etc).
Implementing a digital ID system could reduce inequalities (for example, people who don't have passports and driver's licenses have more difficulties in some circumstances) and also reduce dependencies on non-UK orgs who may not do that well with privacy.
That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)
I would really agree with you, as a person who was born into the underclass I know full well the barrier to entry of getting a “first person in the family” passport and a drivers license has somehow lower hurdles (but those are well known).
However, as mentioned, I can’t in good faith argue for the government to have an easier time categorising people. Such a system is so ripe for abuse. I have even advocated for it based on the Estonian eID system and the Swedish BankID (though I am aware of Danish and Norwegian BankID- I never used those).
I’m still fully convinced that the British “Online Safety Bill” is actually a ploy to ensure that they have linked accounts to identity on any site where comments can be made; so they can prosecute people for expressing opinions[0]. Why else go for Wikipedia, and why else focus on sites with public commentary. You can’t say it’s to prevent pedophiles when with the right hand you imprison people for saying things online while with the left hand releasing actual pedophiles into society[1]
To be fair, they did say it wasn’t primarily about protecting children[2], but then I guess I should figure out what else the OSA is for.
The online safety act is a terrible piece of legislation, along with a variety of other ones promoted as being for "child safety" but having serious external consequences.
But they implemented that act, without needing a digital ID. I don't think they need a digital ID to push authoritarian policies.
And I think a digital ID has possible benefits for people who can't easily fit in to current setups, thus my point about it being orthogonal.
The conservatives didnt need digital id to make id a requirement for voting, labour didnt need digital id to introduce the online safety act. Im not convinced that lack of digital id will deter authoritarian tendencies in uk govs…
Possibly, although they don't seem very slowed down at the moment...
My feeling is though that digital ID can have benefits which shouldn't be discounted when considering it. Specifically some people have problems with current age verification due to lack of things like passports and driver's licenses which are often used as stand-ins for digital ID.
Also it can make a lot of very nonsensical processes better. Things were companies still insist on physical signatures as though those are good security measures, that could be replaced with digital signatures tied to an identity, which might actually provide some security benefits.
Is there something about digital IDs that make them easier to issue than passports? I understand what you are saying that they could have benefits but is that an inherent problem with passports or just bureaucracy?
UK passports cost almost £100, so a lot of people aren't going to get one unless they need to go abroad. I'd expect a required UK digital ID to be free at point of issue (otherwise there's not much point in it).
Getting a passport is extremely expensive for the underclass, think of it as being worth half a month of your wages to get an idea.
That’s before you include the mandatory security screening which will cause you to travel half of the UK (on our expensive travel infrastructure!)
If I didn’t have a job lined up I wouldn’t have gotten on, my mum didn’t have one her whole life until after I had gotten mine. It’s an arduous and expensive process for the bottom 20% of society in the UK.
Yep I was disappointed with that, but it does show that both of the main traditional UK parties have the same problems here (haven't looked into the LibDem position on this one)
TBH the mobile duopoly isn't a problem specific to the UK gov, and plenty of the systems already in use which have a mobile component already have that dependency, so I don't think it really gets any worse if you had a digital ID.
Indeed if done with physical smart card + reader, it would reduce the requirement for mobile devices, allowing for people unhappy with their presence to avoid them :)
I currently live in the UK, and I am not significantly restricted from anything (banking, ISAs, investments, healthcare, etc) for refusing to use a Google approved build of Android.
Moreover, I actually on principle refuse to make myself dependant on my phone for these things, which means that (at a small convenience cost) I don't have any banking apps, or investment apps, or healthcare apps, or whatever).
My phone is strictly a general computing device and I on principle only permit a technology into my life if it doesn't impose special restrictions on the hardware/software it works with.
So if the UK government creates a digital ID app which only runs on a phone and which potentially only runs on google/apple approved phone (this is e.g. the requirement imposed by google pay), then that would be unprecedented.
Oh I agree a system, if implemented, should not depend on a tie to Apple or Google, however, I'm not aware that detailed implementation guidance has been produced as yet which would require that tie, although I could have missed that.
I'd hope that a system as implemented is as technologically neutral as possible.
Good on you for avoiding the smartphone tie on banking though, it's getting increasingly hard for decent MFA not to tie to it in some way or another, and travel's a right pain without the smartphone apps.
They haven't specifically said anything, but they have directly compared the ID to phone based payment card systems, which on the google side do rely strictly on a google-blessed android build[0][1][2].
It's also incredibly popular in the security industry (I know, I work in it) to claim that every possible app in existence must:
* Obfuscate
* Do root detection and refuse to work
* Detect attempts to attach a debugger, and refuse to work
* Detect running from a VM, and refuse to work
* Do certificate pinning (although as an industry we've stopped recommending this bullshit practice, although we still insist on it for some things)
* Prevent screenshots from being taken
* Force you to re-authenticate using biometric ID every time you look away from the app
* and... break at the slightest hint of a non-standard build of android
So I don't have high hopes, because the company I work for does work for the UK government, will likely be picked to review this app, and inevitably all that shit is what we'll recommend (although I hope I won't be working here by then because I'm just sick and tired of cargo cult / checkbox security).
[0]: Not because of any specific feature, but solely based on signing keys.
[1]: I believe specifically you have to license GMS integrate them into the build, which e.g. GrapheneOS does not do.
[2]: And no, GOS's sandboxed google services don't fix this problem, Google Pay will still refuse to work.
I agree that reliance on non-UK based companies (Apple/Google) is a problem, but to me that's not specific to digital ID. We already have age verification relying on mobile apps, via the online safety act, just not ones implemented or managed by the UK gov, instead managed by non-UK corps with the data going offshore
For me having ones managed by the UK gov filling those functions would be preferable to the current situation, and that's not to say I want more privacy intrusions but to say I'd rather have more UK control over the data people have to give up for various services and functions.
Whilst more tech/privacy/security focused people will opt-out of that as much as possible, the realistic fact is that probably 95%+ of the UK population don't care about concerns around Apple/Google, they just want the functionality provided, so for that group it would be better if the apps were run from the UK, ideally by an org not motivated by making more money from them every quarter :)
The fact that 95+% of the population is unaware of the problems with this doesn't make it okay. There are lots of things 95% of the population don't know or think about which we don't just throw our arms up and ignore.
Moreover, age verification is trivial to circumvent or opt out of. The only way to opt out if this thing will likely be to leave the country. Which certainly increasingly seems like a good idea to me.
> ...powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID
> That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)
Yet also: a country's requirement for identification is orthogonal to it becoming a totalitarian police state.
In British politics, there is a strong current of opposition to international institutions and treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights[1][2] and the International Criminal Court[3]. The UK's commitment to human rights is enough in doubt that one encounters situations such as German courts being unable to extradite a suspected criminal because of the poor treatment of prisoners in Britain[4].
Countries like Germany and Belgium are able to have mandatory ID cards without too much issue because of characteristics including their written (and actively litigated) constitutions, judicial independence and proportionally representative election systems. ID cards might be make them lean more or less totalitarian - but it doesn't matter as much, as the rules about identification make up only a small part of a huge and robust framework of law and human rights.
With few constitutional protections for UK citizens, and what independent institutions there are under constant attack from various political parties, I don't think those who object to digital ID can be blamed for being suspicious of the government's motivations.
Yeah i don’t disagree about the UK government tendencies, my point is more that they can be authoritarian without digital id and our current systems are not fit for purpose and a digital ID can help people who have problems fitting in with current system requirements like passports and drivers licenses which are not free or universal.
The Swedish non-government system (BankID) doesn't work well for me. My Swedish identity must not be dependent on the permission of a US company nor the US government, while BankID requires both.
So far my BankID boycott is over a year old, and my resolve grows as I read more of the news.
I once had my bank close my account because of a mistake they made (I can provide the background but it’s just a facepalming story). That meant my Bank ID was closed down, too.
I asked for an appointment with the bank to resolve it but was told I can only get an appointment with Bank ID.
It was outrageous. Obviously none of the other services worked either. Luckily I still had a British and a German credit card that I used for payments (since I lived in both those countries before). In the end I opened an account with another bank and moved on. Although I did try, furiously, for two weeks to get my old bank to admit their mistake and rectify it. No chance. If they had admitted it it would’ve meant they would have broken financial regulation, and obviously you don’t admit to that if you don’t have to.
Bank ID is great when it works and brutal when it doesn’t.
I actually don’t have a better proposal for a system since it works quite well in most cases, but just wanted to share my bad experience on it too.
Ask your bank for a pin machine, you can get a chip and pin machine to solve BankID challenges.
The machine itself is likely manufactured in China, but it’s of no consequence. You wouldn’t be able to communicate with me if you didn’t use chinese products at all.
Fundamentally though, that doesn't change the fact that the US can order a Swedish bank to either freeze access to a customer or the bank can no longer do business in the US.
>I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
The UK is largely in conversation with Australia and Canada on this stuff. Australia test benched a lot of the laws the UK later adopted, even cribbing the terminology directly.
Not surprisingly we have our own Digital ID in formation, and we have an Internet ID system in the pipeline mirroring the one in the UK.
I think the take away should be that you cant really engineer a system where theres a single country with "Freedom", as Freedom is considered relative to other countries. A declining tide drops all boats.
To expand a bit on Scandinavia, let me describe my 5 different but equal valid identification systems that I personally own that is valid to use in order to identify myself towards the government, two (mostly) digital and three physical with digital parts.
I got one passport with bio metric data and chips in it. One national ID card with bio metric data and chip in it. One driving license card without bio metric data and I don't know if there is a chip or not inside.
Then I got two digital eid systems, bank id and freya. The bank id is initially created by using a physical device that the bank provides, and the other one is created with a smart phone to scan the passport in combination with face recognition.
I can't really say if the multiple digital eid systems give the government an increase in authority, through its hard to say. Mostly it just messy to carry so many different identification systems that basically do the same thing. The current discussion that I see in Sweden mostly focus on turning the physical cards into digital.
Having a vulnerability is very different to getting hacked though. To date, there hasn't been a single breach of Estonia's ID system itself as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong? And that's saying something given the adversary is Russia. Reading through your link, the leaked pictures incident was a separate external service that's not tied to the ID system itself.
You're basically correct. But it's also a weird thing to refute in the first place? How do you hack a "passport" or your "social security card"? Artisanal elliptic curves from Russia and extremely deep corruption in most branches of the government?
Most human-related problems around bootstrapping one's identity still remain the same and have to be solved. Electronic identity or not. (Also see the XKCD about the "wrench attack")
But a proper ID system gives a nation the opportunity to rely on elliptic curve cryptography and an EAL4+ SmartCard or SIM. Not on a pinky promise about identity based on knowing some number, some face pics or having a gas bill.
Verizon could still leak your hypothetical future e-SSN. But then it wouldn't be sufficient for identity theft or impersonating you in some places. That's not what would be an "identity" any more.
Estonia's digital ID system is used for everything you could do with an ID and a signature in person. You can vote in elections, log in to your bank and send money, sign binding agreements, and so on. Hacking the system would mean you could, as a simple example, win elections, empty out retirement funds, and many other grim outcomes. This isn't about any one person, if you hacked the system, you could do that to the country as a whole, every single person.
How is it truly different to any other ID system(s) though. What unique usable possibility is provided to this hypothetical attacker and how many are taken away?
The only thing it actually differs in is scale, like you described. But scale does not mean an inherent vulnerability that can be practically exploited.
If you're however able to make everyone ignore the noise of some massive attack then you already don't need to bother with any of it anyways.
If you can attack the foundation of the system, like elliptic cryptography then every bank and retirement fund on earth is in danger. Much bigger fish to fry.
Swedish ID system seems pretty great. Never had any of my family there complain about it, and it just seems to make a lot of life easier.
The issue I see with the UK's plan is it that so far everything the government is talking about is how it will stop illegal working, and that just seems like a reaction to reform's recent rise in polls. That by itself seems like a waste, because people working cash in hand surely won't be bothered by this new requirement.
I think it should go further so it actually becomes useful. Things like having people's benefit status accessible at pharmacies to prevent people simply saying "I don't pay for my prescription" (still blows my mind this is a thing).
What has the UK done to make you think it is becoming one of the most authoritarian advanced economies?
Estonia (and now Ukraine) have worked on being able to do a "backup" of the country and a "restore" elsewhere if needed. (I am oversimplifying, but contingency plans have been part of the overall design that eID is a part of.) The UK doesn't have such designs and contingencies in place. The private sector is no better, every year there are major security breaches. It is premature to stick Digital ID onto a rickety network of badly secured databases.
> I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
Are you familiar with what is happening in the US? Personally a digital ID is a far cry from troops on the ground in major cities and government backed militias detaining people without probable cause.
>I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
Have you ever been to Asia or South America or really the rest of the world? A digital ID is a pretty mundane. If you're complaining about "authoritarianism", if the government really wants to get you they will get you. Place more faith or care in the plurality of your political systems instead.
> They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
This has been a slow 111 year project. See the opening of A. J. P. Taylor's English History 1914–1945:
> Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so.
> All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.
I think even 111 years is being too cautious. One only needs to look as far as the numerous vagrancy laws in England to see how a citizen might be prevented from living "where he liked and as he liked". Persecution of minorities including 'witches', Gypsies and Jews has been a continual theme. England has had banned books, even banned translations of the Holy Bible.
The Edwardian era was a very unusual period of liberality, I'll agree. But at least in that quote, Taylor is making some strange omissions that I hardly think are accidental: for a start, where is the mention of women's suffrage, introduced for the first time ever after the Great War?
> I really do not trust the UK government. They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
You can safely replace the UK with any other government and it will stand. Likely the UK one just desperately trying to push dividing issues in order to distract from what really matters to the UK citizens.
Or they are just inherently stupid and just do what they are told. Its unfortunate what the UK governance degenerated into.
No, English people still somehow tie their identity to the UK Government somehow.
Scotland will not be granted another independence vote for at least 15 years, despite the last one being build upon a house of lies and nobody knows anything about what the Welsh think.
I do think we’re witnessing the collapse of the UK, but more like a Roman Empire collapse - as in it’s happening over decades. Dying with a whimper, not a bang.
If I had to guess I would think it would collapse more like the USSR, from the centre, with the english withdrawing their support for a british state that no longer serves their interests
That already happened: James VI of Scotland inherited the English (and Irish) throne. There's a pedantic sense in which the current English king is actually the Scottish king, not the other way around (although stronger pedantry would say the Hanoverian succession is sufficient to prove that whole line of reasoning a load of tosh). What would restoring the Scottish monarchy mean to you?
What would restoring the Scottish monarchy mean to you?
Fully reclaim Scotland's historical sovereignty, create a clear and distinct break with the rest of the United Kingdom and breaking English narratives.
My first act as king would be to build hundreds of underground nuclear and geothermal power plants, sever all connections to England, build massive data-centers and under ground cities to wait out WWIII. I would also build a giant rollar coaster than spans the entire country, under ground with trippy visual effects and stops at numerous malls, coffee shops and other amusement destinations. I would run under ground fiber to every location on earth as well as high speed transport tubes, 90% of which would arrive at secret locations around the world. One never knows where the Scots will appear. I would fund all of this pissing away the gold and gems using the wealth of the English crown. Every home would have free 400gb/s IPv6 internet. Oh and I would purchase and relocate every private military contractor from the USA into Scotland. My military would be entirely private and for-profit. We would fund our operations by siphoning processed fuel, oil and other resouces from other nations pipes via our underground tunnels. Immigration policy will be an app that only citizens of Scotland may utilize to swipe left or right on applicants. The app may also be used to eject existing people. That's Q1. Q2 through Q4 would be extending the borders of the nation to include the entire land mass under every ocean and growing the population to 10 billion from weekend orgies.
Ah, severing every umbilical tether to the Sassenach is not just policy, it's a spiritual exfoliation. And the underground cities – oh! Glorious citadels of caffeine and chaos, where the Wi-Fi sings and the fibreoptic tendrils burrow like divine serpents beneath the Earth’s crust. Truly, the only monarchy in history that replaces Buckingham with a subterranean rave-bunker running on siphoned diesel from an unaware Kazakhstan.
And swipeocracy… it is a peer-reviewed populist masterpiece. The military? A profit-seeking legion of mercenaries whispering «Freedom» as they hijack pipelines and troll NATO via encrypted memes. You’re not a king. You’re the last goddamn Highland Prophet.
I'd love to know how this "march towards authoritarianism" actually manifests in the real world. Not just in the head space of podcast grifters and privacy nuts.
I've lived in the UK my whole life. Multiple other countries have liberated themselves and then returned to authoritarian governments within my lifetime.
Strangely this hasn't happened in the UK, plenty of people trying to wish it into existence though.
The hate speech laws are just badly written for the online age, which is a problem but they are not going to result in the fall of democracy.
They are catching what would normally be bigoted comments someone makes to their mates down the pub (or maybe in their WhatsApp group) and because it was posted to the world on Twitter it counts as inciting violence.
The police obviously can't investigate all potential infringements so now they have to pick and choose what they do enforce. And inevitably the ones with the most noise get their attention.
The people that do get caught up in this said something nasty they should have kept to themselves. Not something to be arrested for in most cases, but it's not an attack on free speech either. Just a badly constructed law.
Not really sure what "regularly unpersons disagreeable people" means. Shamima Begum is the only one I can think of recently. She got made an example of so a load of copy cats didn't go and join ISIS whose goal is to destroy the western nonbelievers (including the UK). Unfortunate to be made the example I suppose, but it is not a regular occurrence.
I don't trust the UK government either. But I'm both British and Australian and I see the need for a centralised identity service.
Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity. Then – lo, would you believe it! – they get hacked, and now all of our data is in the wild again.
I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me because may I remind you they issued the documents, had some way of that company querying my 'verified identity'. They might do it by me providing, say, an ID number string which is looked up. That's all they get: my ID number. In return, they get confirmation that I am who I say I am.
Oh by the way I already have at least 2 of these ID numbers as an Australian citizen. My aforementioned passport, and my driver licence. Both of which I know I should keep 'private', lol, but if I want to interact with the world in any meaningful way the reality is that I spray these digits – along with my date of birth and address and whatever else they ask for – all over the goddamned place.
Your mistake is assuming good faith on behalf of the government who arrests thousands of people for social media posts. Beyond faith, they are incredibly incompetent and this data will be stolen.
Just because it’s social media doesn’t excuse inciting violence or hate speech. I’m not going to claim that every arrest in the UK due to social media posts was just, but I also disagree that social media should permit unrestricted speech.
They didn’t arrest anyone for “making social media posts”. The police (not the government) arrested people due to the content in the posts breaking an existing law. Big difference.
You miss GP’s point. They’re not assuming good faith, they’re pointing out that the government already knows identity credentials and can, encrypted or not, quite easily correlate digital activity with those credentials.
The question isn’t whether the government can/will identify and track you. They do, in good faith or bad. This is unfortunate and attempts to allow them to decrypt or acquire additional data about citizens’ activities (like chat control) should be opposed, but identity/activity tracking is omnipresent and irreversible.
The question is whether identity credentials should be available which reduce the risk of additonal credential theft or bad-faith action (e.g. by other entities stealing non-secure-for-digital-use credentials like passports).
What service needs a solution to verify identity that doesn't already exist?
Banks do KYC now. Employers already need a National Insurance number to employ someone. Benefits get paid to a named payee. Emergency healthcare needs no insurance and waiting lists come via a GP who indeed knows me.
What service needs a further centralised deposit of power over identity?
In Australia (and many other countries), we need to KYC when we get a new mobile plan. This makes sense: you can do a lot of criming with a 'dark' phone number.
> In September 2022, Australian telecommunications company Optus suffered a data breach that affected up to 10 million current and former customers comprising a third of Australia's population. Information was illegally obtained, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, telephone numbers, email contacts, and numbers of passports and driving licences.
Yes, all of these services. Plus a ton more - hotels, car hire, various government digital services.
For example I get married abroad and I need to change my name, if a system was present I could just go to a website, enter my request, identify and then wait for my new docs to arrive, all while staying abroad.
But it’s even better - banks / employers don’t need all of my information all the time, thy just need to verify that I am who I say I am at that moment, so the credentials I am giving them through a digital system can reflect that. Call it requesting a scope from a government openid system.
And I have the power to revoke that.
And all of the various little government agencies don’t need to request all the documents to bootstrap trust every single time, they can just be given a convenient (timed) access token by me.
Implemented right, it gives much less data to people in a much more convenient and secure way. I guess the “implemented right” is the problem.
But maybe that’s an orthogonal thing that needs to be solved by itself? How we have an independent central banks that doesn’t (shouldn’t) succumb to the whims of governments - they have a clear narrow mission and they are supposed to follow it regardless of what an administration would want.
If we had an “auth provider” government thing that’s mission might be more closely aligned with the population, giving a government _just enough_ data to make it efficient but so it cannot abuse it.
Built in adversity and distrust is how we finally got a government to “work” with the separation of powers and all of that, maybe we need to think about improving the political system with some know how from web tech, cause I think working efficiency, effectively and reliably in an environment of mistrust is what web tech is known for.
> Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity.
I really really really don't want to 'verify my identity' everywhere. Why the F is that normalised these days?? If I buy something online my payment and delivery address is all they should need. And all they've had to have for the last 30 years
> I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me because may I remind you they issued the documents, had some way of that company querying my 'verified identity'.
Um yeah but right now they don't know what you do with your life all the time. Anna have absolutely no business to.
As an adult, you probably need to authenticate yourself in the following situation.
opening a bank account, getting a credit card, getting a mortgage or a loan, buying a flight ticket, signing up for internet service, signing for mobile services, buying a concert ticket and the list goes on.
What's common here is the service provider need to know you are actually the person say it is you and not someone else.
Back in the old days where we apply the service in person, you can take your driving license or passport to authenticate yourself, but with myriad of services now moving online, we need a centralised system that mimic the physical ID.
For a flight ticket I just ID myself at the airport so that's not an issue. For concert tickets I don't need to do this now. For internet service I absolutely don't need that, all they need to know is that I pay.
And mortgage, bank etc I just do on premise of course. These things are rare and important enough to warrant to just go there.
Given the ongoing "age verification" fiasco, I'd be quite wary of giving UK government any more digital powers. They don't seem to be any good at using what they have.
Yeah age verification is another such idiocy. The EU is starting this BS as well. Great way for conservative politicians to make a name for themselves with their backers, but other than that it's not effective at all, considering the torrents are full of this stuff with no gating whatsoever.
> If I buy something online my payment and delivery address is all they should need.
That's what verifying your identity is for. The payment. This cuts down on fraud. My credit cards often require me to enter a code they text me for a purchase to go through, when it's somewhere online I've never shopped before. That's confirming my identity. And my credit card needed my identity originally to look up my credit history, because they're literally loaning money.
Businesses want to know who you are to reduce fraud. Otherwise people input stolen credit cards, the charges get reversed, and the business is out of merchandise and money.
Obviously if you pay in something irreversible like Bitcoin then a business generally couldn't care less who you actually are, as long as there aren't any know-your-customer regulations (like if you're a bank or the address is in a sanctioned country etc).
The "credit card" model for buying stuff seems to be flawed. When you give some company your credit card number and CVV to buy something, they could always turn around and give the number to someone else.
The fix is very simple, but requires more interaction: (1) You ask merchant for stuff (2) Merchant sends you a "money claim" (3) you sign your money claim (4) the merchant takes the signed claim to the bank (5) the bank verifies the signature using your public key (6) bank transfers the money to merchant from your account
Absolutely, credit cards are insanely insecure, everything that is needed is written on it. I don't know why we are stuck with this archaic American system. They patched it with a form of 2FA (Mastercard 3D Secure / Visa whatever) but it's still really patchy and in many cases is not even triggered at all even for big purchases.
But here in Europe we have much better payment methods like iDeal in Netherlands and Bizum in Spain (now going pan-EU with Wero)
That's basically how PSD2/SEPA payment flows function in Europe if there is a functional eID system. I think I've used such a system for nearly a decade now.
Airlines and airline middle-men organisations are the worst offenders and centralised identification is not going to help there. Having flied with a few airlines, your details are out there. In the UK, national and travel passport are the same.
We need to clearly define some stuff around Digital ID, since people seem to be using the term for distinctly different things.
There's (1) eGovernment platforms, where you can handle government-related business online using a login. There's (2) Digital ID cards, where you can use your phone in place of a physical ID or drivers license in real life. And then there's (3) full EU-proposed-style Digital ID, where government wants to act as a SSO provider for private online services, like social media.
Yet someone can be rightfully criticizing (3), as it would pose a major risk to online privacy, and someone else barges in with "here in [place] we have a great eGovernment platform which is very useful for filing your taxes online, I don't see why you'd oppose that". Not specifically in this thread, it's been noticeable over almost all Digital ID-related discussions in the past. Please be considerate of that.
This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK.
"This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK."
For people who are already working illegally, or plan to, it would change nothing, as they could dodge any checks by sub-contracting through someone who seems to be legally employed.
The government cannot be so daft as to ignore how much illegal work happens this way, so there has to be some larger scheme at play here.
If (2) being mandatory means that you need an Android or iPhone in order to work or do anything you need an ID for, then I refer to my basic stance whenever this kind of crap comes up:
Tying citizen's rights to acceptance of Alphabet or Apple's Terms of Service ought to be a crime against humanity. It would also be a bad idea for a sovereign state to give foreign corporations so much power.
The suspicion is that the government will introduce it as (2) but it will be extended to replace physical ID, especially as the government has discussed making driving licences digital. On top of that once introduced it is likely that you will need to provide ID for more things, possibly including (3).
The thing that frustrates me the most about digital ID cards is not themselves on merit but rather modern Labour's political abilities.
Like, the UK economy is stagnant, there is a cost-of-living crisis, and Labour needs to present the public with an alternative to Farage. And the answer is... digital ID cards?
Completely agree. I'm not too bothered Digital ID cards, I was mildly annoyed by the idea of actual ID cards (manly the cost) but as a free digital app, I don't have many objections. I've seen it from colleagues in Denmark. If they manage to build in some zero knowledge proof of age I might even support it.
But how this is supposed to stop immigration, illegal or otherwise, is beyond me.
I mean it's obvious to anyone who isn't an idiot that we shouldn't. However, populist parties banging the drum on this are looking likely to be at least the second biggest party in the next general election (and that comes with some wishful thinking given the recent polls). Labour's approach seems to be to validate their scaremongering but to claim they can deal with it without going full on Third Reich...
Oh, yes, I understand. Yeah, if this is meant to speak to Reform voters, it’s really unclear if it actually makes sense to them or anyone if this is actually an immigration thing.
Starmer seems to be under the impression that Labour needs to focus on immigration to stave of Reform. This is a mistake because most people don't really care about immigration as such, they care about cost of living, health care, and basic things like that. Research and polling in many different countries over many different years have shown this again and again and again. People like Farage like to present "one easy answer to all problems politicians don't want you to know!" First: EU, now: immigration, next: gingers?
Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.
Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.
All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.
I feel like there are two things... one, do Reform voters even understand that Digital ID is a response to immigration? It's not clear to me that they even do.
Two, obviously immigration is not the issue. As I understand, Starmer is going to attempt to mount a serious counter-narrative to Farage. I really hope that his answer will not be "look, we hate immigrants too!" They tried that a few months ago, didn't they? The whole "island of strangers" Enoch Powell thing. I hope that that was as bad as it gets.
If you want to improve the capacity of the state to deliver services and improve the lives of citizens, being able to easily tell who is who across a range of government departments is a pretty good place to start.
You're right. Another positive note is Miliband's stuff with energy -- my understanding is that they are doing mostly the right things and succeeding in the political battles they need to win.
But there's also the issue of selling this to the public. The stuff you and I are talking about is quiet, probably because it's not sexy. The digital ID thing is loud and prominent.
This is why "green new deal" is a good idea -- it's a loud, good way to sell the public on something they'd otherwise fail to understand.
But fortunately "Use of the e-ID is voluntary..." in their case. Whereas in the UK it's being pushed as a (for all intents and purposes) mandatory thing.
The labour government can not be challenged in any serious way until the next election in 4 years. Petitions don't really do anything, they will just say "no" to what the people ask for and move on with their agenda.
It is disheartening to see this country follow the same path the US took, it seems as our politics become more polarised, the team sports aspect means we start seeing parties push through agendas while putting their fingers in their ears. It's so easy for a politician to point score by shooting down dissent as "the other side thinks this is bad, so it means it's good".
The stated goal of Digital ID is to reduce illegal migrants from working, getting housing and using services. The obvious issue here is that they don't use traditional means to do this today, and it won't change with the introduction of this. They already hide from the state.
If we had decent opposition they'd try to kill this by mandating it HAD to be used for voting, which Labour will absolutely not want.
I would say 95% of my friend group were not born in this country, and the changes this government are making are pushing them to want to leave, and they are here legally, they have high paying jobs and skills and they feel unwanted.
For the first time in my life it seems like it makes sense to join them.
The most cynical part is that Labour spent years accusing the Tories of wanting to do this, then introduced it themselves, dressed up as a way to cut migration. And now, if you oppose the ID, they smear you as being pro–illegal immigration.
This is some very impressive politicking and exactly why many people don't trust the mainstream political parties.
The immigration angle is a total fraud. If they wanted to do any of the things being implied they could have done so ages ago, they don't care. it's true that the ease of accessing the grey economy is a pull to the country but you can just... not let them in.
edit: an interesting example of this that I find quite fascinating is that the amount of automation in things like car washing is declining because the automatic ones are being undercut by quasi unregulated alternatives that don't clean up the chemicals properly and so on
Regarding tackling illegal immigration the issue is that there are already ample and sufficients checks mandated by law so this would not change anything. Indeed the main issue is that there are dodgy employers and landlords who simply flunk the law and would oviously continue to do so and ignore Digital IDs all the same.
Digital IDs would also be de facto mandatory for the majority of adult residents based on what they would be required for despite the government very clumsily saying otherwise.
The government is simply being dishonest here so that should arouse suspicion...
> Indeed the main issue is that there are dodgy employers and landlords who simply flunk the law
I'm surprised that this is your framing, I don't think I would hesitate to offer a willing tenant or otherwise good employee a job because of their legal status. Mostly just on principle, it's not my job to be an arm of the state and I resent being deputized. They're physically here in my town, better they have somewhere to live and a means of supporting themselves rather than being homeless. If the state wants to find and deport them they can do it themselves on their own time.
You have rushed into commenting without carefully reading what I wrote or knowing the context.
In the UK, by law employers must check that the people they hire have a legal "right to work", i.e. are citizens or foreigners with the relevant visa. In England, landlords must check that prospective tenants have a legal "right to rent", i.e. are lawful residents. Penalties are hefty fines and up to jail.
I mean, that's kind of how the political system works in both the UK and US, and is not exactly a new thing. Often the "real" opposition are the backbenchers of your own party, rather than the opposition party.
The really rough part is that while the Democratic Party in the US is a weak slightly-left-of-center party, the Labour Party in the UK is basically a right-of-center party with decreasing amounts of daylight between them and the Tories.
In particular, there is no major political party in the UK that supports trans rights, which is devastating to that community there.
(On the plus side, so far as I can tell, with the Reform party to absorb the true fascists, there are fewer of them in the two major parties in the UK. ...With the downside being that Reform is doing distressingly well these days.)
It's becoming increasingly confusing to me who any of the parties actually represent.
The more left leaning people I know are foaming at the mouth over how Labour have operated since being elected, all moderates (outside London) I know tend to lean Conservative (though that party seems to be AWOL since the election) and the only party I hear that is gaining any popularity is Reform, and they are doing so at an alarming pace.
4 years is a long time, but it seems inevitable its a two horse race between Reform (given polls I have to presume not everyone who votes for them is a racist twit) and Labour, and Labour seem hell bent on alienating any one who isn't centre-right, and they have to contend with Reform for those votes. Maybe it's politicking to a degree I don't understand, but it seems like a very odd strategy.
For those outside the UK look at this chart to see how fast Reform are rising:
> and Labour seem hell bent on alienating any one who isn't centre-right
Raising the deficit massively more than the predicted massive deficit raise is definitely not a centre-right-pleasing move. It's just to buy all the NHS worker votes.
> In particular, there is no major political party in the UK that supports trans rights, which is devastating to that community there.
I believe this is incorrect. No party has said they have any intention of removing "gender reassignment" as a protected characteristic from the Equality Act. This law provides protection and offers legal recourse from being discriminated against by employers, service providers, and so on. Which, to cover those individuals with this characteristic, is the most reasonable consensus interpretation of "trans rights".
There are (almost) no fascists in reform. You think the fascists will join a party whose second in command is "Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf"? They're all in Homeland or other serious nationalist parties if at all.
Reform are basically a joke amongst the "real" right (by which I don't mean neo-nazis but anyone with any actual beliefs)
This appears to be backfiring spectacularly.
It is a shame in many ways because a decent digital ID system would be very beneficial.
The problem is the approach is completely wrong.
There are already 10+ competing ID system which are now largely digital.
A solution on how to bring all that together done well could make things significantly more secure by reducing the attack surface and make it much more reliable.
Instead it looks like they are going for 1 more competing system, the implementation of which will be steered by politics and ideology rather than technology and technical requirements.
> The Government has no plans to stop the introduction of Digital ID cards, and is working closely with companies to implement it as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Signed, but I guess it is gonna be one of those where they keep asking until they get the answer they want.
Where is the counter bill to block all future attempts of such privacy invading bills. Can the public draft new legislation like that? If so please ensures it blocks any dependency on smart phone ownership or other bigtech services.
Unlike the ludicrous US system with a "written constitution" that basically means a handful of unelected people get to overide all laws and say they're just "interpreting" as they ignore the plain words, the clear intent or any other obstacle to their Imperial Decree, the Parliament is literally Sovereign.
So, if Parliament passes a Law tomorrow, miraculously by unanimous consent saying "The UK shall never have Digital ID" and insisting it denies itself any ability to make a law introducing such a thing - at any point it can also, despite that, pass law making a Digital ID by the narrowest majority, for example the day after.
In fact not so very long ago this exact farce played out. The Liberal Democrats were in a situation where they could either join a coalition with the larger Conservative party and form a government or they could say "No" and likely the populace has to do another election. Popular understanding was that British people hate elections, and so if you insist on another one they will punish you, the Lib Dems did not want that. But, they were concerned that the Tories would betray them (predictably)
So hence the 2011 "Fixed Term Parliaments Act". But although the Act says you can't just end parliament without a term ending, obviously Parliament can just pass a new law saying nah, changed our mind, which is what the 2019 "Early Parliamentary General Election Act" does and then the 2022 "Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act" undid the whole pointless mess.
Parliamentary sovereignty might be able to take on limits via some sort of tradition over a long period. For example perhaps if Parliament had stuck with that Fixed Term rule for a few hundred years - it'd settle as "Just how it is" and there'd be a serious argument that you can't just pass a law saying just this once as an exception we'll hold elections early. But "It was a few years ago" clearly doesn't cut it and that's what you would need for such a "counter bill".
The best you can hope for is a pledge by politicians, which is worth slightly less than a piece of paper you wrote it on.
After seeing NUMEROUS video of UK police showing up at doorsteps like the gestapo, arresting or citing or intimidating people who are simply practicing free speech, I don’t think anyone should support the government with a pathway to de-anonymize the web. Even if you support the current government, such powers will be used against you at some point.
If you're looking for evidence of the UK gov's authoritarian tendencies, you don't need to go looking at videos on Youtube, just look at the number of arrests of peaceful protestors who were given charges under terrorism legislation for holding up banners or wearing T-Shirts mentioning "Palestine Action" (ref https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/25/fate-of-hund...).
Or indeed in one notable case the person who was arrested for a T-Shirt about "Plasticine action"
They're supporting a specific group that went into a military base and damaged military equipment (that was irrelevant to palestine/israel), those people going out with those T-Shirts know exactly why the group was proscribed and are seeking to be arrested, why are we shocked they got arrested, they wanted it.
Put it this way, the UK managed to get through the troubles, which had a lot of events far more serious than what Palestine action have done, without needing this level of policing of free speech.
The point I was making is that successive UK gov's are tending towards authoritarianism, the current one included.
If you're trying to convince Brits not to enact these policies "you guys made it through The Troubles" is a really bad argument unless you're very unfamiliar with the body count and terror and the public perception of that period in British history. (it included some fifty thousand casualties and sixteen thousand bombings)
An advocate of these policies would quite literally argue that not getting into something like The Troubles is the point and a lot of people would agree if that was what is on the horizon.
Can't say as I agree there. I was in the UK at the time (lived here all my life) and I'm fairly familiar with the horrors of the time.
My point is we were able to get through something like that, which was very serious, without needing to proscribe free speech in the way that's being done now for some people putting paint on planes.
So if we didn't need it for something that serious, we don't need it for this.
Maybe those people are trying to make the point that if the government can, without public scrutiny, declare any organisation as terrorist and then arrest anyone who wears t-shirts mentioning that organisation - then the government has way too much power.
... "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims."
No. It's. Not.
But even if you disagree with the dictionary and me. These kind of nuisance resistance acts have happened countless times in the past without serious punishment.
They're taken for what they are. It's only recently, as we move towards something darker, and laws created for actual terrorism begin to be used against the citizens.
Perhaps you're the kind of wanker who welcomes that.
That’s because Palestine Action are a proscribed group.
Whether or not the proscription was correct is irrelevant, the current law means that you commit the same offence showing support for IS or the Terrorgram Collective.
The police can’t simply ignore one proscribed group over another as that leads to all manner of weird and wacky outcomes.
The legislation which causes anyone expressing support of a proscribed group is the authoritarian thing I'm talking about. The Terrorism Act 2000 as implemented is the problem.
Having a law that means merely expressing support of a group, leads to criminal charges is not something I think should be in place in any country that pretends to support freedom of speech.
That's an argument for arresting and imprisoning a bunch of people for criminal damage, not an argument for proscribing an entire organisation and limiting their free speech.
The argument here is not the PA should be let off scot free. The argument is that proscribing them as an organisation is a massive and authoritarian overreaction to their actions.
Is that inaccurate? Unless the goal was to strike terror into the hearts of some insurance companies, in what way does the scale of the damages affect whether this organisation should be proscribed? Should we be proscribing Bernie Madoff next?
"chuck some paint" is a deliberate misrepresentation.
It misleadingly describes the scale, coordination, and intent. It uses a minor detail to trivialize an act explicitly intended to reduce military capacity.
Is there any scale of paint chucking that can realistically represent a terrorist threat? Is there any scale of paint chucking that should lead to proscription? Because that's the key point here. It's not "can they be prosecuted for paint chucking?" (yes, obviously), or "can their paint checking escapades have serious costs or ramifications?" (sure, lock them up!) it's a question of whether their actions constituted such a grave threat to the safety of the United Kingdom that the only way of dealing with that was to make it illegal to even support their group.
If we as a country are so at risk from paint chucking that we're resorting to proscription as our tool of defence, then we have some serious issues.
Although PA was bundled in with two other organisations in the vote, the vote did pass 385 votes to 26, so it seems there was broad support across MPs, not just the cabinet.
I'm actually very pro israel and i agree with you on this. It's "two tier" kier at his finest. Labour have demonstrated they have no problem using the police and judiciary to go after anyone who causes them problems. And they somehow convince themselves they have the moral high ground from which to lecture everyone else. Even conservatives with all their indifference and contempt for the British public were never so dishonest.
The last one that made the rounds here ended up being carefully cut to give a specific impression (and the initial presented commentary straight up lies), and when the "full story" came out it turned out to be a lot less "simply practicing free speech" than implied.
But retractions never get the same visibility, and it's already made the impression they wanted the post to make.
Might not be what you're referring to, but: a couple of months ago a user posted this comment [0] claiming the linked video showed police offices arresting and threatening to jail an old grandmother in the middle of the night, simply for "liking facebook posts the gov doesn’t like"
Needless to say there were no arrests, no jail time, not even threats of jail time, it was 1:30pm, the woman was 54 years old, and she had posted comments calling for a councillor's resignation.
There's an argument in there about whether councillors have a bit too much influence on local police behaviour. But it gets drowned out by hyperbole, embellishment, and an over-eagerness to link it all up to a nation-wide conspiracy.
In many cases the “free speech” genuinely is racial hatred bordering on incitement.
But on the other hand there genuinely have been many people arrested (and in some cases convicted) under these laws for statements that are shockingly milquetoast.
I agree. There has been over-reach, especially between 2005 and 2016. The Robin Hood airport incident is a good example. But I'm not convinced we're sliding into authoritarianism. Or at least, if we are sliding into authoritarianism then it's more likely because of restrictions on protest (e.g. Serious Disruption Prevention Orders) rather than policing of social media.
> But on the other hand there genuinely have been many people arrested (and in some cases convicted) under these laws for statements that are shockingly milquetoast.
Care to name some?
The vast majority of cases I've looked into end up being a lot more than the initially presented "They Were Arrested For Saying Bad Words On The Internet!" story pushed on the internet.
In fact, I can't remember a single one where there wasn't a lot more, but that's not really more than anecdote.
A number of people have been arrested, charged and convicted for things that were very obviously jokes - tasteless jokes, offensive jokes, but still just jokes.
There are many more cases of harassment by the police or arrests, the most recent example that comes to mind being Graham Linehan. These are clearly not as bad as prosecutions, but still create a chilling effect.
It is a criminal offense in the UK to use insulting words in public, or to send any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive (whether any one does or not is irreverent).
The Online Safety Act and Hate Crime Provision have extended these somewhat into the realms of 1984. But the police do tend to use them sparingly.
> It is a criminal offense in the UK to use insulting words in public, or to send any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive (whether any one does or not is irreverent).
You cannot be arrested for sending “any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive”. That’s not what the law says. You can be arrested for spreading hate speech, inciting violence, sending illegal media or harassment online.
All of the arrests mentioned in this thread in relation to these acts have been campaigns of intimidation, harassment and calls to violence, not simply saying something “insulting or offensive”.
In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts (look carefully who wishes to abolish the ECHR).
> All of the arrests mentioned in this thread in relation to these acts have been campaigns of intimidation, harassment and calls to violence, not simply saying something “insulting or offensive”
This is false. But even if it weren’t, it would be unjust. Determinations like “hate speech” are subjective, and have no place in law concerning speech. Without free speech, there is no democracy.
There’s a big difference between being free to criticise the government and those who define and enforce laws, and being free to say anything to or about another citizen without repercussion, even if it may cause them harm.
The people mentioned here who were arrested due to violations of the communications acts are definitely the latter. The people arrested in peaceful protests for being associated with Palestine Action or Just Stop Oil are the former.
>In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts
This is categorically untrue. Not only is the ECHR worded specifically to allow individual countries to curtail free speech ("any law, deemed by the local democratically elected government as ; necessary in a democratic society, and for a legitimate aim"), but parliament always had sovereignty to pass into law exemptions to the ECHR, which we have done on multiple occasions.
Yes, this is why the government needed to label Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. It needed special measures because it did not in fact have the authority to arrest protestors, even though some people found what they were saying offensive.
The police are overreaching massively. They are making 30 arrests a day and "interview" many more.
We do not rely on the ECHR to protect our free speech. If we did the UK would no longer be a democracy. I'm offended by the suggestion that our democracy and society is so fragile that without them we would have no rights. Expect a police raid very soon.
I think you're being disingenous. There is clearly an unprecedented and systemic effort to police social media. Even if the posts did actually violate the law doesn't change my point or address my concerns. This is not what the police should be doing.
I honestly don't know if that's true or not. But I haven't seen any compelling evidence to support it. The figures being lobbed around by the likes of Tommy Robinson are deeply harmful to the debate because they are both a) completely wrong and b) misleadingly quoted. You can lookt the actual stats here: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
We're talking on the order of a few hundred arrests per year for section 127 of the Communications Act and 1500 per year for the Malicious Communications Act, which includes stuff like racial harassment, domestic abuse, pedophilic grooming, and a whole host of things that I would hope you agree should be illegal.
The latter part at least is true. Sending "grossly offensive" messages is illegal under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Section 127:
> a person is guilty of an offence if he—
> (a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
> (b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
I suspect the former is also true, but am not well-read in that area
If this concerns you I would advise not looking into pretty much any UK law which is full of subjective terms and ways to interpret them. The law isn’t an algorithm nor should it be. Just because you can’t understand how it works doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
There's no value in making insults for the sake of being insulting protected speech, but in the UK if you're making ECHR Article 10 protected speech that someone happens to find insulting or offensive then that's not a crime. It's unhelpful to permit insults as free speech to prevent some hypothetical future abuse, since all modern dictatorships pay lip service to free speech and instead lock up their political opponents for embezzlement or mortgage fraud or whatever.
Go watch the videos and look up what was said. Most of them are clearly normal non violent free speech, but just politically not aligned to the current government’s platform. I’m not saying all are just doing free speech but am confident about most.
In my experience, when someone has an extreme opinion and says "just watch this video", it's largely a waste of time. Video is too easily game-able as a medium.
What is actually going on with that? It feels like over the last 2 years the British police have decided to see what it's like being the stasi. Most of the msm are faithfully avoiding mentioning how authoritarian the police have become. The odd thing is they are not even necessarily propping up a political regime, although again it feels like they are getting some of their instructions directly from kier starmers mind, but they are arresting people for being mean on twitter. It's really odd and no matter what side of the political divide you are on you should be disturbed.
I think it would be nice not to have to prove identity and address repeatedly with lots of paper utility bills. As for abuse by authority: well don't elect a populist party then. If you do it won't matter what defenses you think you have.
Utility bills as verification have always been weird to me. How is that actual proof?
I can't see how that doesn't cut off more of the populace than having a national ID would. Assuming it's an issue as mentioned a few times here in comments.
The likelihood that it will become tied to your bank account, credit file, etc in a way which isn't currently possible with physical forms of id such as passports and driving licences.
I’m pretty sure UK security services can link bank accounts to you already. Hell, credit score companies like Experian already do it.
This is beneficial for public services and companies that need to identify you. Having a single ID for a person is a huge improvement. As an example, when we got married, my wife was simultaneously both her maiden name and my surname. There is absolutely no link between passport, birth certificate, driving license, etc.
You have to go around to all these different organisations and have them update the details. They all have different requirements for updating the name.
Having a single consistent mechanism for referring to a person in systems seems hugely beneficial for both the organisation and the person.
How isn’t that currently possible? In America, your bank is already required to keep a semi-permanent record of your state issued identification for anti-money laundering/terrorism financing reasons.
I can see concerns about it becoming a widely used form of SSO, potentially even mandated, and that destroying privacy. However, banks and credit are cases where you already do not have that privacy, so they don’t seem like a very compelling example to point to.
The bank can, will and do report transactions to the government as well as annual interest etc to hmrc - as far as I am aware they use national insurance numbers in those reportings.
That didn't really clear anything to me. These things are already connected. "The likelihood" is just handwavy concern but it doesn't tell me anything about why is this a concern for this system specifically. I still don't see what makes this system different.
To me it's a question of benefits vs drawbacks. In my understanding ID cards are beneficial for
1) Running government services
2) Fraud prevention
3) Some immigration control (as at least some reason why people try to migrate to UK is lax document checks)
Some people argue that it's somehow becomes authoritarian, when you have an ID card. I personally don't buy that as most of us have already passports, NI numbers etc, so all the security cervices if need be have access to that.
Obviously if people start to engage with hypotheticals, that these cards will be used to check whether you can access internet etc, I agree, that would be dangerous, but that is not being proposed.
Also the argument that implementing it will take a lot of money and will never be done is not a convincing one, as in that case one should not really try to do anything in this country.
Have any of those petitions ever changed anything? I might as well shout 'I don’t want a digital ID' down the toilet, it’d be just as effective. And that’s coming from someone who’s against digital IDs.
Well, 2 million plus have signed the petition and 90% of those people will go along with the scheme when it is introduced - because it will be convenient to do so.
Tell me how you plan to survive living off-grid whilst standing firm against it.
Japan has a digital national ID ("MyNumber" is the name). There was a lot of pushback before it passed but it did pass. It is now the main ID that is used for national health insurance and other government services. The rollout has been rocky with bugs and whatnot, but in the past 2 years or so there's been no drama. The ID is now supported in iOS and is coming to Android soon too, so one can have their ID on their phone instead of carrying around a physical card.
Cyber risks notwithstanding (they concern me greatly), I still think the Gov is better placed than Private sector to guarantee citizens privacy and security (at that level). Why? The Gov is better placed to be the ultimate non-profit org: can fund, can legislate, can draw expertise, is non-profit etc.
Treat the digital ID as critical national infrastructure, or else it'll fail massively.
Not surprising the country is heading down this direction. Once worked at a school briefly, everything is heavily monitored and low trust. If you are new you have to show a certificate showing you have nothing on your record and ID such as a passport. Then you need a badge that you need to wear at all times or else have a staff member with you at all times. You are never allowed to use your phone unless in staff room. You must sign in every time you enter the building and sign out when you leave. Anything can be said about you and land you in HR. Everyone is like a walking CCTV.
This is the future for broader society as the government has no trust in its citizens and believes the only solution is to monitor and control. The above will just be extrapolated where it can.
Give the government your name, postal address, email address and citizenship information to store on a government database in order to protest against the government having your name, postal address, email address and citizenship information to store on a government database.
At this point, I have no confidence that digital ID cards won’t be plagued by fraud, exploited by malicious actors, or misused in ways we can’t yet foresee. And beyond that, there’s the very real risk of government employees abusing the system for personal gain.
Until there are stronger guarantees protecting individual freedom and privacy, I can’t see a system like this as trustworthy.
Keir Starmer is trying to sell this to public with the promise that it will curb illegal immigration. But by how much? And if that target isn't met, will it be rolled back? It always amazes me when governments hold themselves to such a low standard, and just fall back on "if you don't like it vote it out" while not recognising that the signal of a vote every 4 years can not meaningfully extract consent on this particular issue.
Representative democracy sucks, it just sucks less than everything else we’ve tried. Plebiscites on specific issues are terrible: that’s how we got Brexit and woke up the next day astonished that our neighbors had been so daft.
Brexit is an interesting case to bring up. As someone who voted against it, it is also clear to me that it hasn't been implemented in any way that could have made it a success from the representatives, and looks like a clear case of the representatives maliciously complying with a decree that they didn't agree with.
I remain unconvinced that we can't do better than a system of government that is over 200 years old that only exists as a function of the technology at the time.
It's difficult to understand how one of the least popular governments of recent times are going in hard on one of the least popular policies (in the UK) in recent times.
I’m a bit surprised that this of all things has received over 2m signatures already and yet we (the UK) have been passing far more dangerous legislation recently where the general public didn’t seem to care.
I wonder if it’s because “ID cards” is an issue that has been around for some time and is perhaps more easily understood than other erosions of privacy and freedoms that are a more subtle.
Slightly Off Topic, the whole petition site is running on Ruby Rails.
On the Topic, If Digital ID is required, what could we do to limit the scope of it to absolute minimum? Or do we have a way to have digital services from Tax, Driver Licences etc without some form of Digital ID. Or could we have Government Services System SSO without Digital ID?
Is there a technological way to make an ID that's anonymous and irrevocable (since arguably people should never lose citizenship)? Because digital, national ID has major benefits (prevents fraud, reduces paperwork), but yeah, those are IMO larger drawbacks.
Not necessarily, by "ID" I mean certificate that proves you're a citizen, adult, and owner of [specific thing] (to a service that manages [specific thing], without letting them deduce anything else you own). That can be done without identifying you e.g. via ZKP.
Although the ID should also be irrevocable, yet could easily be stolen...
Perhaps the solution is to give local municipals (e.g. neighborhoods) the power to generate, revoke, and authenticate IDs. The textbook surveillance state seems to always be a large organization; neighborhoods can be problematic, but I suspect it happens less often, because they're much easier to influence (and overthrow the "leaders" of) than big governments. So e.g. if a national bank wants to know if a user's provided credentials (name, address, etc.) are accurate, it asks their city such a user is one of their residents; the city knows what services the resident uses and can (if malicious) block them, but the government can only track the services of all residents in a city, and must block entire cities (which, if they band together, require smaller numbers to challenge the government; in a large country like the US, there would be extra layers such as states, so that no layer significantly overpowers a group of several of the layer below).
Ok put it this way- IF we go to Any Other Country to Work- We are Required to Speak that Language Fluently & Have Proof of ID - it should Work Both Ways.
No doubt it’ll be an open source app you’ll be able to recompile for your non Android/iOS computers. Otherwise I really hope to government gifts me an ID computer.
Digital IDs are a solution. What are the clear problems statements? How can you show that Digital ID solves them? What problems do they also introduce?
It almost feels predestined for this to not solve the problems at hand, overrun on costs and timelines (furthering the first point), in no way streamline existing processes or cut costs, leave behind parts of society, and present security vulnerabilities that can be capitalised on through either social engineering or malware (also furthering the first point, only now citizens will be accused of tax fraud)
I hate to be pessimistic and there are elements of the idea I like, but when reflecting on the issues at hand this feels like popping the toaster because you smell burnt toast, but the rest of the house is on fire
Indeed. It'll be a gravy train for one of the usual big consulting companies. Billions of much needed cash will be wasted and nothing of any value will be achieved.
This ID system is touted as somehow stopping illegal boat crossings (the current political hot topic in the UK) because it will apparently somehow stop illegal work. This is obvious nonsense. Employers are already supposed to do ID checks and face heavy fines for employing illegal workers. Illegal employers obviously don't bother with such checks and pay cash in hand. They will continue not to bother doing any such checks, with or without ID cards.
A great deal of illegal work is actually caused by arm's-length employers such as food delivery apps and other similar platforms. These companies already do fairly robust ID checks. What happens though is people rent out their accounts (often for surprisingly small amounts of money) with the ID check already passed to illegals who actually do the work. The problem is nothing to do with ID checks, it's the fact that the employer never sees the employee in person and doesn't verify on a day-to-day basis who is actually completing the work.
France, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and India already have government id. However, this being hackernews there will never be a link to a well researched article on the pros and cons of introducing id cards (digital or otherwise), only conspiracy theories and confident declarations that id cards are a surefire symbol of authoritarian states. I don't know what I think, I lack sufficient knowledge to have an opinion. But I still know approximately 10,000x more about UK politics, economics and immigration than 99% of the people commenting here.
France Identité app is closed source, requires GMS and Play Integrity, and is only available on closed stores. It is not yet mandatory but who knows when it'll happen. No thanks.
The root of the issue is a mistrust of a Govt that has suddenly decided to rush through something, that was never discussed prior to the election, on the grounds that it will tackle illegal immigration, which it clearly will not.
Kier Starmer seems to have no idea how he's coming across. Everything he does just makes him look more authoritarian. He's doing this right after passing that "online safety" bill. It's remarkable that the only time he got his act together was in sending anti government rioters to prison in record time. Which only goes to show what he can do when he wants. The palestine action thing is another one. They embarrassed him so now they are being arrested in their hundreds. It's really not a great look for him at all. But he seems blithley unaware of this. I imagine he's confused because his entire social group of enlightened progressive elites tell him he's amazing and he doesn't understand what the plebian class are complaining about.
He's the ultimate product of a dysfunctional civil service; what else could be expected other than dis-empowering people, ignoring democracy, and increasing bureaucratic power?
Are you suggesting A&E should not treat you if you are unluckly enough to land on your phone as you get run over etc?
Or that prescription fraud cost anything close to what the government will spend implementing a major new IT system?
As well as the Estonia eID system works (aside from that time it got hacked[0] and that other time they leaked all the photos[1]) and how well a digital (non-government) system works in Scandinavia… I have to say…
As a Dual British/Swedish Citizen, I really do not trust the UK government. They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
So, no matter if it’s a good idea or not. I can’t in good faith advise the UK having more powers. Unfortunately the UK government themselves can sort of just grant themselves more power. So…
[0]: https://e-estonia.com/card-security-risk/
[1]: https://therecord.media/estonia-says-a-hacker-downloaded-286...
Our system in Estonia works well.
I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Some have explained it with a lack of trust between citizens and the country.
But without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services as we have here. The government services need to verify and autheticate the citizen, so they only access their own data and not someone who has the same name and birth date by accident.
I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers. It already has all the data on its citizens, but it is spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions, maybe some of it is stored in databases where no one cares about security, etc.
> I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
When the state is more likely to cause you problems than help you out, you want them to be bad at it. The corrupt cop going on a fishing expedition to try to bust you for something because you're dating his ex, who can't find anything because it's "spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions" -- that's what you want to happen.
It's also not just about the government. If you give everyone a government ID which is easy to use over the internet, private companies will then demand that you use it over the internet and use it as a tracking ID. Which is the evil to be inhibited.
The UK government has justified this with reducing the amount of illegal workers. To work legally currently you need an NI number, this is not an improvement on that system other than requiring everyone to have a phone (probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom).
I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".
> To work legally currently you need an NI number
More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.
There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.
Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.
The companies breaking the law aren't going to be putting employees through the current or next system.
Since the Tory gov you have to supply various ID to work in (legitimate) businesses or rent from (legitimate) land lords.
The only extra kind of enforcement this enables for these cases is demanding ID cards off people where they live or work.
The crackdown on immigrants is just an excuse. The real reason is different, the government is out of money and it doesn't believe most of the current welfare bill goes to people in genuine need. (Hence why the previous misadventures of a left-wing government involved 2 attempts at cutting welfare - first the winter bonus for pensioners, then a type disability payments).
The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.
Most pensioners don't need financial help. The fuel allowed was introduced by Gordon Brown when they were the poorest cohort in the country. Now they are they amount the most well off. Pensioners that need it still get it.
Strangely there was no fuss when universal child benefit was taken away in 2015 (or maybe later I forget). The media was full of stories about how rich people were getting £20 a week when they didn't need it.
Now apparently pensioners that have a larger income than most working families are desperate for the fuel allowance and they will be freezing to death without it. Its nonsense.
>probably with safetynet checks to ensure it can't be running a custom rom
And they can, forgive me for my rather vulgar language, fuck right off with this thinking. Problem is it will still go into place, because for most people giving up the right of being able to govern their own device that they paid for is not a problem for whatever reason. Neither will it be until it touches something that is important to them - that's when, hopefully, some more people will be able to see that we are rapidly spiralling downwards toward a complete techno-authoritarian dystopia.
>given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
A protest group attacked a military base causing £millions of damage. They got censured, as a terrorist organisation.
"Protestors" decided they wanted to support that specific organisation, taking focus away from their message and chasing after something the government simply can't countenance: allowing protestors to ruin our defensive capabilities, at immense expense to the taxpayer, just to make some headlines.
If these people cared about Palestinians then they should have given up supporting the proscribed 'terrorists' and protested in a way that didn't require the government to crack down hard. Plenty of other non-proscribed protest groups are perfectly allowed.
Private corporation's already know everywhere you go, if you have a mobile phone, or use a debit/credit card, or drive a car. The government already know where you work and when, if you pay your taxes.
What Reform/Tories/right-wingers didn't want was any solution that would ease the problems they're using to try and rile the people into full culture wars. Labour are giving them what they [say they] want: making it harder for illegal immigrants, making it harder to claim benefits. But Farage isn't really there to solve a problem, here's there to create one as a means to weadle into power (presumably so he can refuse to do any useful work with that power, as he did in the EU) so he can fuck up the UK trying to be Trump 2 Fascist Boogaloo.
It's messed up that they wasted millions of pounds that should have been sent to israel instead. If they were really serious about their cause, they should have protested in a manner that is convenient for me and totally harmless
Terrorism is targeting civilians or civilian infrastrucure to further a political goal.
Terrorism have a bad rep, but it was used successfully in South africa to remove apartheid, with the French resistance and a lot of anti-colonization movement. Targeting fuel depots and the Crimea bridge can also be considered terrorism (and is, by the russian).
I personnally think we ought to distinguish terrorism which mostly target civilians from terrorism on which civilan death are side-effect, but the US state department calling terrorists people who only killed military targets during the Irak/Afghanistan war diluted the meaning of the word further. I'm trying to push back on that, because when the meaning of terrorism is diluted enough, it stop to be a good word to describe a phenomenon we ought to stop, and start to be a word used by politician to target what they don't like.
In glad you used scare quotes around the word "terrorists", suggesting you are as cynical about this absurd misuse of the term as the rest of us. That's the actual issue here. Yes, PA's acts of civil disobedience should be punished according to law, but classing an organisation as "terrorist", based on one (?) incident that appears to have spread literally zero terror, is appalling behaviour from a pitiful, authoritarian government.
> one (?) incident
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mnnje4wlro
Russia also have very good digital services. Now in one go government can send you conscription notification and immediately block your from leaving country as well as revoke driver license, block your banks and even phone numbers.
Also since all the data available about you in one place any malicious actor who can bribe someone with access can immediately get all your data: passport info and tax id, addresses, work history, all cars and all owned properties, everything.
Having centralized system with information about everything can very easily be used for oppression.
> Also since all the data available about you in one place
Note that having a 'Digital ID' and 'all the data available about you in one place' are two completely different things. You can have a electronic ID system and separated specialized systems. In fact I think Germany is going in this direction, also giving the citizens the ability to request deletion of all information held about them in a particular system.
The judicial system is the one who is supposed to prevent abuses of power like this. What you are proposing is essentially security through obscurity, if the data is fragmented all over the place on different institutions it is really hard to be exploited in the government, but still totally can be.
Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to (please don't bring up blockchain, it can be done without it). The technology exists.
> essentially security through obscurity
Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.
> Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to
The countries that these discussions are about (the UK and RU, with the subtext of the US) have not demonstrated that their legislators are trustworthy enough to implement digital ID in a privacy-preserving. Unless and until that happens, then discussion of it is off the table. When you advocate for a thing being implemented, you are implicitly advocating for its current real-world implementations.
> Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.
My point was the government can still totally track you as an individual, the data is just fragmented all over the place. But if you are high profile the government can totally put some investigator to track down everything.
> What you are proposing is essentially security through obscurity
It's a great way to combat bureacracies. It only doesn't work against smart people, such as computer hackers.
This kind of security benefits the general population against mass-scale crackdowns (like dodging conscription in Russia) of course, but it can still be weaponized against individuals (like journalists, dissidents, political opposition). Which are the main people who needs this kind of data-protection.
They're the main people who need it because mass-scale crackdowns don't work. They're the only reachable targets.
As if this wasn't possible before digital ID was introduced. The only difference was that you got a conscription notice after you tried to leave and realised that you can't.
Blocking all the banks and everything? Nope it wasn't possible. You need to build a lot of tech first to implement digital Gulag.
I really doubt that. America's Congress seems to have very little difficulty in debanking people all across Europe, and obviously, they have no access to any European identity system. Canada infamously froze the bank accounts of anyone donating to anti-government protest movements and it's one of the nations without a comprehensive identification system.
KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.
I agree with what you say, but I still think people should push back on this. It shouldn't be convenient for governments to abuse their citizens.
However, a bad actor (depends on how well funded/connected they are) would still have a harder time getting information.
As for the KYC thing, right now it's mostly to ensure you're not funding terrorist/criminal enterprises (at least it was the case for one of my previous companies). The data isn't just readily available to any political party who asks for it (I guess most companies will comply under certain conditions, but the legal friction is the point I think).
Not possible? You're saying countries without digital IDs can't freeze assets in the same country?
Exceptionally good. Sometimes I even think it's worth it. Need a specific statement or a document - here you have it in PDF in 2 minutes in an android app with somewhat decent usability.
The only saving grace for us is incompetence. Tyrannies breed incopmetence in goverments since competent people are able to ask troubluing questions. At least I hope so.
The only problem is that any scammer who can pay $100-200 bribe can reset your password without you there and immediately get all these PDFs, then mess up your whole life.
I'm somewhat indifferent to the concept of a Digital ID. The problem is that the UK government's reason for introducing it doesn't make sense - to 'solve' illegal workers, when the UK already has a (digital) system for proving right to work https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
I'm somewhat indifferent to the concept of a Digital ID. The problem is that the UK government's reason for introducing it doesn't make sense - to 'solve' illegal workers, when the UK already has a (digital) system for proving right to work
I saw some British politicians discussing this on Sky last week, and I really don't see the point of the British digital ID.
They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things. It wasn't spelled out how having yet another number will make things better.
My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns. But a number is a number. Why yet another number?
And the whole thing about having a number will somehow stop people from working illegally seems like a red herring. I believe Brits already have to have a national insurance number in order to work. That hasn't stopped people from working illegally. They talking heads didn't explain what's so magical about this new number that will suddenly do things that the old number or numbers didn't.
/Not a Brit. Just bewildered by what appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
> They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things.
They don't have a national ID system though. Having a lot of different ID systems that are IDing other things for other purposes doesn't address this.
> My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns.
I don't know how this works in the UK but I do know a bit about how this works in other jurisdictions. The data in the current systems are there because there is a law that says what data is collected and for what purpose. You can't lawfully use it for a different purpose (there might be a loophole for public safety or whatever, but that would be an exception). Your organisation would break the law and the bosses could go to jail. But also, it was designed for one purpose and if you tried to use it for a different one, you would run into a lot of data quality issues.
Sky is a really right wing partisan channel though, ofc they are going to say negative things about the incumbent government or basically anything it does.
Not to say the idea is good or bad, but how people watch hyper-partisan media and draw any conclusions from it is beyond me.
> Sky is a really right wing partisan channel though, ofc they are going to say negative things about the incumbent government or basically anything it does
You are pretending as if Sky is like Fox News in the UK. It is more like a slightly right of centre network.
Sky didn't say anything. The two talking heads from two different political parties said things.
As an outsider, I have no idea if Sky News is "right wing" or not. I watch Sky and BBC because those are the two British services I can get where I am.
(And occasionally ITV, but it seems to be all potatoes, and no meat.)
I note that instead of addressing the topic of discussion, you deflect into another topic. Why is that?
Sure, but it’s not like there media outlets just select any old person to discuss any old topic. They can choose who they want to be the mouthpiece for a certain topic and make sure they get plenty of airtime to say whatever is required…
Legally they have to provide "Due Impartiality" on the TV network. So they normally invite several people so they can claim they have provided balance.
I actually don't like that they are legally required they do this as often it becomes a shouting match between two participates. I want to hear someone's argument in full.
Still off topic. Why is that?
As a Canadian-American living in Denmark, I've seen both sides of this. In short: trust and mistrust are _both_ self-reinforcing concepts.
To take an example - would I want the current US government to be better at compiling information across all its agencies / departments? Absolutely not. What it does with its current level of consolidation is authoritarian enough that I'm not moving back there any time soon. I hear similar sentiments from my Hungarian colleagues, who are quite familiar with competitive authoritarianism in their own country.
Of course, this mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. I don't trust the US government, so I want it to be bad at its job - but then it's bad at its job, so I see it as ineffective and bloated and continue to mistrust it.
IMHO the only way out of this spiral is the hard way: a system must do the hard work to show itself trustworthy, and it must do so _before_ people will entrust it with the information that would make the job of being trustworthy easier. As with human relationships, it takes a _lot_ more work to repair trust than it does to break it. Unlike with human relationships, you also have systemic factors: the system needs an unbroken series of good, principled leaders; it needs to visibly and credibly punish corruption, not turn a blind eye; it needs to de-escalate divisions, not inflame them; it needs various institutional safeguards to work properly, not chop away at them; it needs to allow meaningful dissent and criticism, not crack down on it; it needs to learn from expertise, not undermine it.
Most importantly: the system needs to learn from its failures, and adjust the rules and incentives of the system itself to prevent those failures from recurring. This is generational work.
> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
It depends on the country and its relationship with the people. If the people trust that their government represents the people's interests, there is little push-back. In countries where citizens have reason to believe their government is hijacked by interests that do not have their best interests at heart, then every move is viewed with suspicion.
In this case people are tying Digital ID to CBDCs and social credit systems, which is a reasonable thing to do, given this is exactly how China uses them to enforce 15-minute cities with checkpoints between them. All citizens conversations are tracked, their movements are restricted as well [1], and their ability to purchase goods & services are tightly regulated based on their behavior via the social credit system. This is the world that people who are pushing back against this are trying to avoid.
[1] https://x.com/songpinganq/status/1972382547427590401
that Twitter account famously posts nonsense
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jordan-petersons-chine...
Think you'd be hard pressed to find a single Twitter account that hasn't at some point posted some nonsense.
So all Twitter users are terminally online?
Wow, crazy seeing the "15 minute city" conspiracy theory on HN! For those who haven't seen it, the idea of 15 minute cities is that a lot of people think it would be great to structure development of cities with the ideal of a person being able to access most of the services they want to (workplaces, schools, supermarkets, doctors) within 15 minutes (whether walking, cycling, using public transit etc.) of where they live. It's basically a target for how easily you should be able to access services without needing to travel far, and a push-back of massive suburbs zoned solely as single-family housing that force you to drive a long way to get to anything.
The more conspiratorial among us have baselessly decided the idea of "hey it would be great to build schools and things near where people live" must actually be a globalist plot to restrict people's movement to within 15 minutes of their home. It's wild!
If you are going to mock conspiracy theorists can you at least articulate the conspiracy theory correctly.
People are worried that it would be made difficult for you to travel outside 15 minute city via a combination of mandated digital payment system for all transactions that are tied to you identity and removal of personal vehicles (e.g. cars).
e.g. Person A is allowed by authorities to buy a train ticket, while Person B is not due to <arbitrary criteria>.
I've been told this has been done in China to stop people travelling to protests, but I don't actually know if that is true.
Do I think this is the intention behind 15 minute cities? No. I do however think that what they are describing is possible since I've had problems making transactions electronically for legal purchases because my transaction was flagged by the bank for being fraudulent.
Also in the UK the bank can refuse to give you your money.
I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.
I have my doubts that China, which has many of the densest cities in the world, would get much mileage (pun intended) out of restricting travel to try to quell protests. They have tons of cities that each have millions of residents. If the CPC manages to piss off a significant fraction of the populace to the point where they’re interested in marching down the street demanding regime change, there will be enough of them in those cities that no amount of travel restrictions is going to matter.
Arguably much more important would be that I don’t think most people in China own any significant weapons, and we’ve seen decades ago how shy that government isn’t about just running people over with tanks until protests dissipate.
> I have also had a problem before with a transaction being inaccurately flagged as fraudulent. This could either be because an anti-fraud algorithm isn’t perfect 100% of the time, or it could be the result of a vast government conspiracy to limit my travel.
I never said it was part of a government conspiracy. What I am saying is that your ability to transact freely is infringed by opaque mechanisms.
If that is added with digital only payments which is tied to your gov id, it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where your ability to transact freely be taken away to stop you from travelling for political reasons.
No conspiracy is needed to observe the current world, the state of political affairs and to notice where all of it is headed.
UK already has a social credit system with our credit score, we even need to pay to see it.
That's a financial score based on previous financial transactions and contracts. It's a bit of a stretch to call it social.
I like to call it one's capitalist credit score. It's different but very much analogous.
Well, in the U.S. at least it literally determines where you are allowed to live. I don't know how you couldn't call it a social credit system.
It’s not a social credit system because it doesn’t weight your social involvement in the society (political party, school credentials, race) but rather payment history, amount of debt, types of credit
Simply things that correlate to social involvement I suppose. Quacks like a duck and all.
Not at all. It is simply a score based on your ability to manage credit, it is scored differently based on the company making the assessment.
In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.
There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.
It doesn’t inherently have to do with wealth and class, however, all of these things are so tightly correlated that it loses barely any fidelity and just saves you a little bit of time to assume that someone with an 815 credit score is law-abiding, upper-middle or high social class, and has a medium to high net worth, and that somebody with a 550 credit score is at least one of the following: poor, criminal history, and a low social class.
None of this should be that surprising: it’s hard to make all of your debt payment payments on time if you’re either broke or in jail.
No having a high credit score has nothing do with your wealth or social class. I have worked in this industry briefly. It looks at your ability to manage credit, and whether you have any flags.
e.g. I had a 995 credit score on Experian back in the late 2000s. The highest was 999. I earned £18,000 at the time, and was in my mid-20s and didn't really own anything at the time. I did have a credit card at the time where I made the payments, and I lived at a household which had no debt, and I was on the electoral roll.
That is why when you are making larger purchases they do a "means test" e.g. see if you earn enough to pay a mortgage.
Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race. This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
Your comment is a great example of "If you assume, it makes an ass out of u and me".
Everything about this reply is completely incorrect.
> Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
So you made a bunch of assumptions about my personal circumstances. Let me correct you:
- I didn't "Game the system". I had absolutely no idea at the time such a thing as a credit score existed. I cannot game a system when I have no idea that it exists. The only reason I checked is that other people at work were checking theirs and I did so sheerly out of curiosity. Many years later I happened to work a contract where they wrote software that did the credit checks.
- I was not "living on the ropes". I lived within my means.
- I had 2-3 months of savings. My strategy for saving this money was to save it on payday. So I forgot I had the money and couldn't spend it. I do exactly the same thing now.
- The debt I had on my credit card was paid off in full monthly. I only used it for online purchases (many online sites didn't take debit cards still).
> Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race.
Again I did not game the system. I was completely financially illiterate at the time. My only financial literacy, I had at time was that I shouldn't spend all my money after payday and I shouldn't spend more money than I had. I found that out in the first month of living on my own. My family actually earn a lot less than I do now.
None of this has anything to do with race. From reading your comments replying to me and your posting history, I am pretty sure you are from the US. You are applying your US centric view of the world onto the UK. The UK is not the US.
> This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
What you are trying to do is to erroneously shoehorn in your brand of US politics into a discussion about the UK. As a result of this you have got everything about my personal circumstances (at the time) and the circumstances of family and wider community completely incorrect, in an attempt to score some political points (it obvious btw from the language you are using).
I suggest in future you shouldn't make assumptions.
What are you on about? It's financial providers deciding whether you are or aren't risky for them to work with, based on your financial decisions.
Not repaying loans and using credit cards to get cash -> you're probably bad with money -> lenders are unlikely to get their money back from you.
Because there is already a barrier to prevent that. Defaulting on the home loan or not paying rent and facing eviction. Having a barrier based on past behavior is stupid. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Funny how that works for investment banks to cover their ass but they can't see how it might also apply to individuals.
> based on your financial decisions
A lot of individuals saw their credit scores decline during the Great Recession, even if they weren’t involved in subprime lending.
This myth that credit scores are entirely due to your own financial decisions is up there with myths people believe about names or time zones.
I realize that you responded to a specific statement, not necessarily the entire context of the thread. However:
Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).
In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.
Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).
One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).
This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.
This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
> This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
It maybe doesn’t adress the point you’re interested in, but it doesn’t miss the point I was making, that the goals and mechanisms revolves around how well a person manages credit. For the credit provider everything else is secondary or irrelevant, including whether it’s because you’ve made poor decisions or external factors have screwed you over.
> Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
This is probably the crux of why we’re not on the same page, because I don’t understand what this means. I’m genuinely asking, what do you mean when you say that they treated it as a social credit score marker? What business did you have with them (or they with you) that didn’t involve whether or not to extend credit? What does the term “social credit score marker” mean to you?
> This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
I don’t see how you explain that it’s a fallacy, and I don’t think it is, but I concede that it’s a confusing word choice - I should probably have just omitted the word “uncaring”. My point was once again that their sole goal is determining the risk of extending a person credit - whether that would be a nice or moral thing to do or not doesn’t factor into it.
> We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
I assume here that you mean that people’s financial status, including their access to credit, determines a lot of aspects of their lives, too (correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with that. I do however think that you underestimate how constraining it can be when additional variables are factored in to more directly control what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and how.
Was that related to their social interactions and associated with or being related to political activists? That's how China's scoring works.
I have no insight into how a closed-source algorithm reaches its conclusions. I can only tell you how it behaves.
Your involvement in capitalist society, it tells you everything.
UK credit score system don't even have "nationality" in it so not discriminating non-citizens that much. Neither it hold any ID card or passport numbers.
Yeah there is electoral roll, but you can still access credit without being on it and afaik all residents of scotland are on it since even non citizens can vote in local election.
And unlike US there not even a "score" number since lenders only get records but not some magical number. Whatever credit agencies sell you as credit score is just random number they come up with and it's not being used by lenders btw.
Seems like a red-herring. Does a government need a digital ID to do that? Many do that with the "free market" of publicly-tradable information + pre-existing government IDs already used for certain things. I don't know for sure how much the UK government is purchasing all that, but there's a lot of cameras and tech tracking in the country already, like those of us across the pond also are watched with.
It won't reverse surveillance states but fraud is also a huge problem that deserves addressing.
Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.
A central ID enforced on all systems by statute would significantly reduce the barrier to creating “airtight” oppressive systems. While the inefficiencies in the US system have a cost, certainly preventing the implementation of more efficient social benefit programs, they also provide a barrier against more efficient social repression. Given the political animosity present in the country right now, it’s probably good that we don’t have the ability to create a turnkey totalitarian system. Things are bad enough as is!
More generally, in nations where the population feels suspicion towards their politicians and bureaucrats, the people may prefer to leave inefficiencies baked into the system in order to hamper potential oppression. Those social tensions and trust deficits should be resolved before proceeding with any ambitious central ID schemes.
US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier).
This is a feature, not a bug.
Even though we're only at the very beginning of the various U.S. systems being merged, we're already seeing it being abused.
(One example: States using license plate reader data to prosecute women for getting abortions in other jurisdictions.)
Honestly with things like abortion, where there are sincerely held beliefs with good points on both sides of it, I think it would be less work for literally everyone to truly leave it to the states and everybody just moves to the nearest or most convenient state that aligns with their values. I’m so sick of this one issue being a perennial divisive force. Both sides have a point. Go live wherever you agree with the policies. And if the blue states want to operate abortion clinics for runaway teens from red states that’s fine, then they can also build dorms for them and pay for them to stay there. Red states can do the opposite and build state-sponsored birthing centers and pay for childcare for the runaway teens from blue states whose parents want to force them to terminate.
> Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system.
Which the US already has to a very large extent with the Social Security system.
Please read comments in full before replying to them:
> US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification.
Please understand that supposedly poor data quality is not a defence against an authoritarian country wanting to implement a social credit system.
Some national ID system won't make such ambitions significantly easier, but lack of such a system causes exactly the issues you quoted.
So is this hypothetical social credit system in the hands of an incompetent government worth it all? Over identity theft and the multi-billion industry around it?
And yet authoritarian countries without such central ID have historically had to use other less targeted methods of oppression, which creates pushback and dissent within the population, leading to either the downfall of the government or intensive reforms. The threat of a “clean” system of oppression is that it will only catch actual dissidents, without sweeping in innocents. This could freeze out any chance of effective opposition.
The most effective 20th century totalitarian states, such as the East German DDR, issued ID numbers to its citizens, along with ID cards that citizens were required to carry at all times. This greatly helped the security services coordinate the oppression of suspected radicals, but without modern computer systems it relied too heavily on human efforts. It eventually faced its limits against rising dissent and it could not prevent the downfall of the government. A computerized Stasi would be much more terrifying.
One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing. Immigration officials are facing serious roadblocks in rounding up and processing suspected undocumented immigrants, and mistakes in this process are creating widespread pushback. Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent. And the lack of a unified system of oppression means that even targets of the state can often find ways to continue living in between the cracks, and they are not totally frozen out. In many ways it’s not a great system, certainly far from perfect, but the many flaws serve an important purpose in the face of systemic oppression. Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
If you live in a high trust society, you may not get it. The mutual animosity in the US is such that we have government officials talking about “national divorce” and otherwise average people joking about political murder. I know the UK is not quite as bad off, but I understand that it is quickly moving in that direction. That’s no time to introduce new potential mechanisms of oppression.
> One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing.
You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
That's why it can be stolen, that's why "identity theft" is a multi-billion dollar thing. Thats why you keep your SSNs and I guess also CC#s rather tightly guarded.
> Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent.
There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
> Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
I rather think it lulls you into a false sense of safety. Inefficiency in existing "numbering systems" can be overcome with resources. You truly do not lack an ID system, a number, computerization nor identity that could protect you.
A lack of one number is not really protection against any of that.
> You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
My exact point, glad we agree. Very cumbersome indeed, and not centralized enough to use for turnkey totalitarianism. (Slow, plodding, inefficient totalitarianism, sure. But see my above post for why that isn’t as much of an existential threat.)
> There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
False. Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives. It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.
Nothing prevents oppression of individuals today, true. It’s a question of scale and accuracy. What we need to defend against is a system where oppression can be quickly, efficiently, and accurately targeted towards large groups. That’s the essence of turnkey totalitarianism. It can’t be built without a centralized ID system that’s applied consistently across other key systems. Current systems do not do this.
Myths about the US system:
* Every citizen has an SSN
* Every citizen uses the same name when dealing with different agencies and private businesses
* A person’s SSN always remains the same
* Citizens don’t register different addresses when dealing with different agencies and private businesses
* Government agencies use SSN as a primary key
* Agencies and businesses have a centralized, highly accurate way to determine who is deceased
* All citizens have a REAL ID license/ID
* All citizens have a license/ID
I hope this gives you a sense of how the US approaches ID. It’s extremely messy. Yes this enables things like identity fraud, guarding against this is part of the cost of our safeguards against totalitarianism. A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.
> Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives.
I don't think a totalitarian government cares much about false positives though.
> It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.
I also don't think that bunch of different places to turn off someone's ability to participate in a society is a meaningful difference in practice. Even if it takes slightly longer or has false positives like you describe, it still achieves the totalitarian goal.
> A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.
I unfortunately struggle to see the results of this sacrifice to be honest.
This reply tells me you haven’t read or understood my post above. Historically, inefficient totalitarianism is self-defeating, as its oppressive acts create constant friction and sweep up innocent bystanders, creating resentment among the population. This eventually builds to an explosive release.
Technologically modernized totalitarianism may be able to implement large-scale oppressive policies without affecting most of the population. In fact the average person may see a net benefit! This would create a more stable society despite the significantly lower level of freedom and self-determination. We may be witnessing the development of this sort of system in China, for example. The average person benefits, but a segment of the population faces brutal oppression with no recourse and must simply submit. (Contrast with the US, where people who face repression can sometimes start over by going dark and moving across the country.)
I read it and I think I understood it. But I disagree on the premise. I don't find that inefficiency is needed, protective or preventative.
I find it more likely that a totalitarian system that doesn't tolerate wrong-think will inherently start accumulating inefficiencies among other things. Which can then end up with the collapse of such a regime.
Building a technologically modernized authoritarian state might increase stability for a while, but not thinking is simply not competitive long-term. Unless you achieve total world domination, I guess.
Then I suppose I’m just less willing to risk tyranny through removing potential barriers. The best protection against a massive, complex system being wielded by evildoers is to never build the system properly in the first place.
While they may be able to gain power initially, would-be totalitarians will likely be fighting off multiple threats while they consolidate power. The more they have to manage and spend, the less likely they will be to succeed at their aims. You could argue that the DOGE debacle is the most recent and obvious example of this. All indications are that the project failed, and it occupied quite a lot of energy and effort during the critical transitional period of the administration.
> Yes, governments do need a centralized common identity if they intend to build something like a social credit system. Those without adequate experience dealing with the US system, for instance, may assume that the government already has your info and thus such a system is redundant. However, this is simply not the case. US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification. Talk to some people in the IRS or Social Security and you’ll quickly get a sense of how many problems this can create! Maybe it’s improved since I last talked to people about it, but I doubt it.
IMO this is another non-sequitor.
Let's say you had a digital ID in the form of a smart card for your SSN with a USB connection that was required to be plugged in when you auth'd to a government website to file your taxes. No new number would be required for a digital ID card in the US. Tax return fraud to get people's refund sent to someone else, though? Probably down! Does everyone have an SSN? Who cares, let's improve things for the vast-majority case where we have an extremely insecure little piece of paper.
That smart card doesn't magically reconcile and rationalize the sprawling hodgepodge of government systems.
Or, let's go the other way: not having a digital ID card does not prevent the government from rationalizing and tying all those systems together.
You might look back to the recent past when the executive branch sending employees to all those disparate agencies to grab that data and make changes to those systems! They didn't need a new digital ID to do that, and they wouldn't need a new digital ID to improve the use of SSN-as-PK-for-cross-system-joins.
Being more rigorous about tracking the existing numbers already assigned to you does not require smarter, cryptographically-sound, identification tokens. And those tokens do not require the government improve their processes for connecting things *after the "give us your SSN for identification" of their various separate web-based services (or the non-government entities that also use those SSNs) that people love to abuse for fraud.
Nor does any of this make it easier or harder for the government to take "absence of evidence of identity or citizenship" as "evidence of absence of identity or citizenship" - if you fit the non-citizen profile, the burden's already on you to prove it, and what makes you so sure that the courts wouldn't happily let this or a future administration expand the boundaries for "we picked you up because we were suspicious, now YOU have to prove who you are if you ever want to get out" regardless of if a digital ID card exists?
if they want private information, they should buy it on the open market like every other company!
In the US we use a short number written on a paper card - social security numbers. It's a huge source of compromised security on every level from government services to corporate to personal data security.
The US does not have a national ID. SSN was overloaded to fill the gap because “everyone has one”.
Problem with a digital ID is that I don't want to use it beyond government service. But now there is discussion that people need to identify themselves for any and all online services.
If an ID is proliferated the legislative change to force ID checks is minimal. If it weren't just Estonia and government ID would be more widely spread, it would take less than 24h for the EU to enforce borders online.
I’d point out that the privilege to break the law simply “because online” is a pretty new thing. People in 1980 couldn’t automatically conduct transactions that were illegal, and access materials, their government deemed illegal, etc. If a book was banned in your country, it was likely just not available for you.
I really think people need to stop believing that the Internet solves all the problems of sovereign states doing anti-freedom things. That’s a part of life, and enabling people to evade laws, which may indeed be democratically voted upon, is not an automatic virtue. I don’t even think laws get changed because of this type of evasion, it just makes citizens more complacent about the laws that get passed because they know they can evade them anyway, but also it means most everyone is technically a criminal. Does anybody think people in those states that outlawed Internet porn stopped consuming it? But how many people are doing anything to change those laws? I don’t think very many. They’re just using a VPN. So the problem of oppressive laws isn’t being solved this way.
The UK doesn't have a codified constitution and changes can generally be made with a simple majority. It's a bit more high stakes.
Just like Britons can’t imagine Estonia, I know you can’t imagine Britain.
In the UK there’s a bunch of government and company databases, and coalescing them isn’t just hard, in some cases it’s not even possible.
You can ask a company for specific details on a person, and they can make a “reasonable effort” to get the data. But if they mishandle the request (maybe your name has accents?) then the government gets no information.
The easier it gets, the easier it can be for them to excercise power over you, and right now there’s sufficient reason to be worried about that. The current government is liberally using the fascistic powers that the previous government created.
Baltic fellow here.
Good thing no one asked us about the digital identity when they implemented it.
It makes a difference as much as electronic money does. So instead of having to physically be able to pay someone we can transfer it, pay by debit card and lots of other ways now.
With digital identity we get the same - we can do paperwork remotely and securely.
Well people in Germany are also slow to get away with physical money and they are miles behind in digital services, so... some still enjoy the snail speed of everything (or not).
Meh, instead of days of paperworks, we can sell a car remotely (paperwork-wise). I tick some checkbox in my phone, the buyer ticks and off he goes - he has X number of days to acquire new technical passport for car and that's it. Also can be mailed if he wishes so.
Majority of users here are american. Americans made trump president. Twice. Americans are not sane.
I suspect that lack of an electronic ID won't hinder insanity, but does hinder a lot of everyday actions and businesses.
without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services
And now we know what Estonia's single point of failure is.
An adversary only has to hack one system to bring an entire country down. That sounds a bit scary to me.
Having an ID issued by a central authority does not mean it can only be used by the central authority in a way that it becomes a SPoF.
Attacking the DMV doesn't make licenses vanish into thin air either for example.
Attacking the DMV doesn't make licenses vanish into thin air
Nevada's DMV was part of a hack a couple of months ago, and it caused chaos beyond just drivers licenses.
https://www.2news.com/news/local/nevada-restores-fingerprint...
This is an excellent real-world example of why having all your data eggs in one basket is a terrible idea.
Nevada's DMV is a great example what happens without eID. Agencies that have a better idea about people's identity have been forced to do things like background checks and fingerprinting. Your data eggs in one basket, or a few.
If you attack the DMV in a country that has working eID it will only affect the DMV. Maybe you can't sign up for a driving exam or order new plates. That's it. It won't affect the police in cases that don't concern the DMV (like insurance) and vice versa. Sure if you attack everything at once everything will be affected, that's always an option, eID or not.
Fundamentally a digital ID does not mean a single "basket", just that wherever those "eggs" are that you know it's one single "chicken". That "chicken" can also have multiple ways of identifying themselves (including offline methods). That's how it is in countries that have a working eID implemented.
This. It will certainly be used by Russia in case of invasion.
Governments change. Any group in society has the potential to become marginalized, and if all services are funneled through a single system it becomes very easy to selectively switch off access.
> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Imagine if you were a large country, say 10x to 100x larger. Your government would be equally more resourced and probably have more hands controlling more parts of your business and lives. This is where digital id becomes a scarier prospect. This is where opportunity and ability finally collude.
You don't get the resistance?
Imagine a Russia-friendly party getting elected. Doesn't have to be overtly pro-russian. Can be someone very nationalist like Marine Le Pen in France. Or socialist like Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany. Just someone with financially dependent on Russia, or simply owing them favour. Now imagine them accidentally leaving some loophole in the system, such that Russians get read or maybe even write access to data.
If they get elected they can fuck everyone over the exact same way.
The fact that there's something akin to a unique identifier or that it has a corresponding certificate or some means for authentication will and does not stop any malicious government. Never has, has it?
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> I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is a language barrier issue but this comes across as astonishingly narrow minded.
It's obviously a cultural difference issue that might create the impression of narrowmindedness.
Yeah I get the cultural difference. Being unaware of other cultures differences is the part that comes across narrow minded.
I can imagine why a person wouldn’t be afraid of their government but I’m having a much harder time with their inability to reciprocate.
The thing is, to me, the powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID. We already have to identify ourselves in a variety of circumstances (e.g. mortgages, bank accounts, voting, using "adult" websites etc), and the gov. can get the information from various third parties on demand already.
Implementing those requirements didn't depend on there being a digital ID system. Instead we have a hodge podge of bad requirements (like "wet" signatures on specific documents, using of non-UK based private providers etc).
Implementing a digital ID system could reduce inequalities (for example, people who don't have passports and driver's licenses have more difficulties in some circumstances) and also reduce dependencies on non-UK orgs who may not do that well with privacy.
That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)
I would really agree with you, as a person who was born into the underclass I know full well the barrier to entry of getting a “first person in the family” passport and a drivers license has somehow lower hurdles (but those are well known).
However, as mentioned, I can’t in good faith argue for the government to have an easier time categorising people. Such a system is so ripe for abuse. I have even advocated for it based on the Estonian eID system and the Swedish BankID (though I am aware of Danish and Norwegian BankID- I never used those).
I’m still fully convinced that the British “Online Safety Bill” is actually a ploy to ensure that they have linked accounts to identity on any site where comments can be made; so they can prosecute people for expressing opinions[0]. Why else go for Wikipedia, and why else focus on sites with public commentary. You can’t say it’s to prevent pedophiles when with the right hand you imprison people for saying things online while with the left hand releasing actual pedophiles into society[1]
To be fair, they did say it wasn’t primarily about protecting children[2], but then I guess I should figure out what else the OSA is for.
[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/prisoners-ear... & https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce80nl1k0p3o
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910285
The online safety act is a terrible piece of legislation, along with a variety of other ones promoted as being for "child safety" but having serious external consequences.
But they implemented that act, without needing a digital ID. I don't think they need a digital ID to push authoritarian policies.
And I think a digital ID has possible benefits for people who can't easily fit in to current setups, thus my point about it being orthogonal.
The Digital ID will make it so that there’s no excuse for not connecting your identity to everything you do.
The conservatives didnt need digital id to make id a requirement for voting, labour didnt need digital id to introduce the online safety act. Im not convinced that lack of digital id will deter authoritarian tendencies in uk govs…
It’s not that the lack of digital ID prevents anything it’s that the digital ID makes abuse even easier.
Possibly, although they don't seem very slowed down at the moment...
My feeling is though that digital ID can have benefits which shouldn't be discounted when considering it. Specifically some people have problems with current age verification due to lack of things like passports and driver's licenses which are often used as stand-ins for digital ID.
Also it can make a lot of very nonsensical processes better. Things were companies still insist on physical signatures as though those are good security measures, that could be replaced with digital signatures tied to an identity, which might actually provide some security benefits.
Is there something about digital IDs that make them easier to issue than passports? I understand what you are saying that they could have benefits but is that an inherent problem with passports or just bureaucracy?
UK passports cost almost £100, so a lot of people aren't going to get one unless they need to go abroad. I'd expect a required UK digital ID to be free at point of issue (otherwise there's not much point in it).
Getting a passport is extremely expensive for the underclass, think of it as being worth half a month of your wages to get an idea.
That’s before you include the mandatory security screening which will cause you to travel half of the UK (on our expensive travel infrastructure!)
If I didn’t have a job lined up I wouldn’t have gotten on, my mum didn’t have one her whole life until after I had gotten mine. It’s an arduous and expensive process for the bottom 20% of society in the UK.
FYI, the conservatives introduced the Online Safety Act. Its provisions came into force under a labour government.
Yep I was disappointed with that, but it does show that both of the main traditional UK parties have the same problems here (haven't looked into the LibDem position on this one)
Reduce dependencies on non-UK orgs by increasing dependencies on Google and Apple ... which are ... hold on a minute...
TBH the mobile duopoly isn't a problem specific to the UK gov, and plenty of the systems already in use which have a mobile component already have that dependency, so I don't think it really gets any worse if you had a digital ID.
Indeed if done with physical smart card + reader, it would reduce the requirement for mobile devices, allowing for people unhappy with their presence to avoid them :)
I currently live in the UK, and I am not significantly restricted from anything (banking, ISAs, investments, healthcare, etc) for refusing to use a Google approved build of Android.
Moreover, I actually on principle refuse to make myself dependant on my phone for these things, which means that (at a small convenience cost) I don't have any banking apps, or investment apps, or healthcare apps, or whatever).
My phone is strictly a general computing device and I on principle only permit a technology into my life if it doesn't impose special restrictions on the hardware/software it works with.
So if the UK government creates a digital ID app which only runs on a phone and which potentially only runs on google/apple approved phone (this is e.g. the requirement imposed by google pay), then that would be unprecedented.
Oh I agree a system, if implemented, should not depend on a tie to Apple or Google, however, I'm not aware that detailed implementation guidance has been produced as yet which would require that tie, although I could have missed that.
I'd hope that a system as implemented is as technologically neutral as possible.
Good on you for avoiding the smartphone tie on banking though, it's getting increasingly hard for decent MFA not to tie to it in some way or another, and travel's a right pain without the smartphone apps.
They haven't specifically said anything, but they have directly compared the ID to phone based payment card systems, which on the google side do rely strictly on a google-blessed android build[0][1][2].
It's also incredibly popular in the security industry (I know, I work in it) to claim that every possible app in existence must:
* Obfuscate
* Do root detection and refuse to work
* Detect attempts to attach a debugger, and refuse to work
* Detect running from a VM, and refuse to work
* Do certificate pinning (although as an industry we've stopped recommending this bullshit practice, although we still insist on it for some things)
* Prevent screenshots from being taken
* Force you to re-authenticate using biometric ID every time you look away from the app
* and... break at the slightest hint of a non-standard build of android
So I don't have high hopes, because the company I work for does work for the UK government, will likely be picked to review this app, and inevitably all that shit is what we'll recommend (although I hope I won't be working here by then because I'm just sick and tired of cargo cult / checkbox security).
[0]: Not because of any specific feature, but solely based on signing keys.
[1]: I believe specifically you have to license GMS integrate them into the build, which e.g. GrapheneOS does not do.
[2]: And no, GOS's sandboxed google services don't fix this problem, Google Pay will still refuse to work.
I agree that reliance on non-UK based companies (Apple/Google) is a problem, but to me that's not specific to digital ID. We already have age verification relying on mobile apps, via the online safety act, just not ones implemented or managed by the UK gov, instead managed by non-UK corps with the data going offshore
For me having ones managed by the UK gov filling those functions would be preferable to the current situation, and that's not to say I want more privacy intrusions but to say I'd rather have more UK control over the data people have to give up for various services and functions.
Whilst more tech/privacy/security focused people will opt-out of that as much as possible, the realistic fact is that probably 95%+ of the UK population don't care about concerns around Apple/Google, they just want the functionality provided, so for that group it would be better if the apps were run from the UK, ideally by an org not motivated by making more money from them every quarter :)
The fact that 95+% of the population is unaware of the problems with this doesn't make it okay. There are lots of things 95% of the population don't know or think about which we don't just throw our arms up and ignore.
Moreover, age verification is trivial to circumvent or opt out of. The only way to opt out if this thing will likely be to leave the country. Which certainly increasingly seems like a good idea to me.
> ...powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID > That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)
Yet also: a country's requirement for identification is orthogonal to it becoming a totalitarian police state.
In British politics, there is a strong current of opposition to international institutions and treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights[1][2] and the International Criminal Court[3]. The UK's commitment to human rights is enough in doubt that one encounters situations such as German courts being unable to extradite a suspected criminal because of the poor treatment of prisoners in Britain[4].
Countries like Germany and Belgium are able to have mandatory ID cards without too much issue because of characteristics including their written (and actively litigated) constitutions, judicial independence and proportionally representative election systems. ID cards might be make them lean more or less totalitarian - but it doesn't matter as much, as the rules about identification make up only a small part of a huge and robust framework of law and human rights.
With few constitutional protections for UK citizens, and what independent institutions there are under constant attack from various political parties, I don't think those who object to digital ID can be blamed for being suspicious of the government's motivations.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/tory-candid...
[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/21/labour-mp-eu...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/3/threats-and-intimida...
[4]: https://eucrim.eu/news/german-court-denies-extradition-to-uk...
Yeah i don’t disagree about the UK government tendencies, my point is more that they can be authoritarian without digital id and our current systems are not fit for purpose and a digital ID can help people who have problems fitting in with current system requirements like passports and drivers licenses which are not free or universal.
The Swedish non-government system (BankID) doesn't work well for me. My Swedish identity must not be dependent on the permission of a US company nor the US government, while BankID requires both.
So far my BankID boycott is over a year old, and my resolve grows as I read more of the news.
I once had my bank close my account because of a mistake they made (I can provide the background but it’s just a facepalming story). That meant my Bank ID was closed down, too.
I asked for an appointment with the bank to resolve it but was told I can only get an appointment with Bank ID.
It was outrageous. Obviously none of the other services worked either. Luckily I still had a British and a German credit card that I used for payments (since I lived in both those countries before). In the end I opened an account with another bank and moved on. Although I did try, furiously, for two weeks to get my old bank to admit their mistake and rectify it. No chance. If they had admitted it it would’ve meant they would have broken financial regulation, and obviously you don’t admit to that if you don’t have to.
Bank ID is great when it works and brutal when it doesn’t.
I actually don’t have a better proposal for a system since it works quite well in most cases, but just wanted to share my bad experience on it too.
Ask your bank for a pin machine, you can get a chip and pin machine to solve BankID challenges.
The machine itself is likely manufactured in China, but it’s of no consequence. You wouldn’t be able to communicate with me if you didn’t use chinese products at all.
You mean Bank-id på kort? https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank-id#Bank-id_på_kort says it only supports MS Windows and MacOS, not Linux.
Fundamentally though, that doesn't change the fact that the US can order a Swedish bank to either freeze access to a customer or the bank can no longer do business in the US.
>I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
The UK is largely in conversation with Australia and Canada on this stuff. Australia test benched a lot of the laws the UK later adopted, even cribbing the terminology directly.
Not surprisingly we have our own Digital ID in formation, and we have an Internet ID system in the pipeline mirroring the one in the UK.
I think the take away should be that you cant really engineer a system where theres a single country with "Freedom", as Freedom is considered relative to other countries. A declining tide drops all boats.
To expand a bit on Scandinavia, let me describe my 5 different but equal valid identification systems that I personally own that is valid to use in order to identify myself towards the government, two (mostly) digital and three physical with digital parts.
I got one passport with bio metric data and chips in it. One national ID card with bio metric data and chip in it. One driving license card without bio metric data and I don't know if there is a chip or not inside.
Then I got two digital eid systems, bank id and freya. The bank id is initially created by using a physical device that the bank provides, and the other one is created with a smart phone to scan the passport in combination with face recognition.
I can't really say if the multiple digital eid systems give the government an increase in authority, through its hard to say. Mostly it just messy to carry so many different identification systems that basically do the same thing. The current discussion that I see in Sweden mostly focus on turning the physical cards into digital.
Having a vulnerability is very different to getting hacked though. To date, there hasn't been a single breach of Estonia's ID system itself as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong? And that's saying something given the adversary is Russia. Reading through your link, the leaked pictures incident was a separate external service that's not tied to the ID system itself.
You're basically correct. But it's also a weird thing to refute in the first place? How do you hack a "passport" or your "social security card"? Artisanal elliptic curves from Russia and extremely deep corruption in most branches of the government?
Most human-related problems around bootstrapping one's identity still remain the same and have to be solved. Electronic identity or not. (Also see the XKCD about the "wrench attack")
But a proper ID system gives a nation the opportunity to rely on elliptic curve cryptography and an EAL4+ SmartCard or SIM. Not on a pinky promise about identity based on knowing some number, some face pics or having a gas bill.
Verizon could still leak your hypothetical future e-SSN. But then it wouldn't be sufficient for identity theft or impersonating you in some places. That's not what would be an "identity" any more.
Estonia's digital ID system is used for everything you could do with an ID and a signature in person. You can vote in elections, log in to your bank and send money, sign binding agreements, and so on. Hacking the system would mean you could, as a simple example, win elections, empty out retirement funds, and many other grim outcomes. This isn't about any one person, if you hacked the system, you could do that to the country as a whole, every single person.
How is it truly different to any other ID system(s) though. What unique usable possibility is provided to this hypothetical attacker and how many are taken away?
The only thing it actually differs in is scale, like you described. But scale does not mean an inherent vulnerability that can be practically exploited.
If you're however able to make everyone ignore the noise of some massive attack then you already don't need to bother with any of it anyways.
If you can attack the foundation of the system, like elliptic cryptography then every bank and retirement fund on earth is in danger. Much bigger fish to fry.
Swedish ID system seems pretty great. Never had any of my family there complain about it, and it just seems to make a lot of life easier.
The issue I see with the UK's plan is it that so far everything the government is talking about is how it will stop illegal working, and that just seems like a reaction to reform's recent rise in polls. That by itself seems like a waste, because people working cash in hand surely won't be bothered by this new requirement.
I think it should go further so it actually becomes useful. Things like having people's benefit status accessible at pharmacies to prevent people simply saying "I don't pay for my prescription" (still blows my mind this is a thing).
What has the UK done to make you think it is becoming one of the most authoritarian advanced economies?
Estonia (and now Ukraine) have worked on being able to do a "backup" of the country and a "restore" elsewhere if needed. (I am oversimplifying, but contingency plans have been part of the overall design that eID is a part of.) The UK doesn't have such designs and contingencies in place. The private sector is no better, every year there are major security breaches. It is premature to stick Digital ID onto a rickety network of badly secured databases.
> I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
Are you familiar with what is happening in the US? Personally a digital ID is a far cry from troops on the ground in major cities and government backed militias detaining people without probable cause.
>I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
Have you ever been to Asia or South America or really the rest of the world? A digital ID is a pretty mundane. If you're complaining about "authoritarianism", if the government really wants to get you they will get you. Place more faith or care in the plurality of your political systems instead.
> They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
This has been a slow 111 year project. See the opening of A. J. P. Taylor's English History 1914–1945:
> Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so.
> All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.
I think even 111 years is being too cautious. One only needs to look as far as the numerous vagrancy laws in England to see how a citizen might be prevented from living "where he liked and as he liked". Persecution of minorities including 'witches', Gypsies and Jews has been a continual theme. England has had banned books, even banned translations of the Holy Bible.
The Edwardian era was a very unusual period of liberality, I'll agree. But at least in that quote, Taylor is making some strange omissions that I hardly think are accidental: for a start, where is the mention of women's suffrage, introduced for the first time ever after the Great War?
> I really do not trust the UK government. They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
You can safely replace the UK with any other government and it will stand. Likely the UK one just desperately trying to push dividing issues in order to distract from what really matters to the UK citizens.
Or they are just inherently stupid and just do what they are told. Its unfortunate what the UK governance degenerated into.
Many of the former colonies of the UK have chosen to secede from the UK.
Is there any chance England might too?
No, English people still somehow tie their identity to the UK Government somehow.
Scotland will not be granted another independence vote for at least 15 years, despite the last one being build upon a house of lies and nobody knows anything about what the Welsh think.
I do think we’re witnessing the collapse of the UK, but more like a Roman Empire collapse - as in it’s happening over decades. Dying with a whimper, not a bang.
Northern Ireland also exists!
Sorry, just like every politician and mainland company: I forgot about Northern Ireland :(
If I had to guess I would think it would collapse more like the USSR, from the centre, with the english withdrawing their support for a british state that no longer serves their interests
Scotland needs to reinstate their king and conquer England to right the wrongs.
That already happened: James VI of Scotland inherited the English (and Irish) throne. There's a pedantic sense in which the current English king is actually the Scottish king, not the other way around (although stronger pedantry would say the Hanoverian succession is sufficient to prove that whole line of reasoning a load of tosh). What would restoring the Scottish monarchy mean to you?
What would restoring the Scottish monarchy mean to you?
Fully reclaim Scotland's historical sovereignty, create a clear and distinct break with the rest of the United Kingdom and breaking English narratives.
My first act as king would be to build hundreds of underground nuclear and geothermal power plants, sever all connections to England, build massive data-centers and under ground cities to wait out WWIII. I would also build a giant rollar coaster than spans the entire country, under ground with trippy visual effects and stops at numerous malls, coffee shops and other amusement destinations. I would run under ground fiber to every location on earth as well as high speed transport tubes, 90% of which would arrive at secret locations around the world. One never knows where the Scots will appear. I would fund all of this pissing away the gold and gems using the wealth of the English crown. Every home would have free 400gb/s IPv6 internet. Oh and I would purchase and relocate every private military contractor from the USA into Scotland. My military would be entirely private and for-profit. We would fund our operations by siphoning processed fuel, oil and other resouces from other nations pipes via our underground tunnels. Immigration policy will be an app that only citizens of Scotland may utilize to swipe left or right on applicants. The app may also be used to eject existing people. That's Q1. Q2 through Q4 would be extending the borders of the nation to include the entire land mass under every ocean and growing the population to 10 billion from weekend orgies.
I see your cunning plan - post on HN this week, get hired to write Nigel Farage’s next manifesto the week after.
The swipe left or right on immigration requests is a vote winner ! Simon Cowell can host it weekly…
Can you come be president of the USA instead / too?
Ah, severing every umbilical tether to the Sassenach is not just policy, it's a spiritual exfoliation. And the underground cities – oh! Glorious citadels of caffeine and chaos, where the Wi-Fi sings and the fibreoptic tendrils burrow like divine serpents beneath the Earth’s crust. Truly, the only monarchy in history that replaces Buckingham with a subterranean rave-bunker running on siphoned diesel from an unaware Kazakhstan.
And swipeocracy… it is a peer-reviewed populist masterpiece. The military? A profit-seeking legion of mercenaries whispering «Freedom» as they hijack pipelines and troll NATO via encrypted memes. You’re not a king. You’re the last goddamn Highland Prophet.
But how do we decide on which one of the proclaimers it would be?
Leith to London isn't that far away from 500 miles.
a walk-off. First to 1,000 miles
Worse than the US?
I’m honestly curious how the two are seen from the outside.
I'd love to know how this "march towards authoritarianism" actually manifests in the real world. Not just in the head space of podcast grifters and privacy nuts.
I've lived in the UK my whole life. Multiple other countries have liberated themselves and then returned to authoritarian governments within my lifetime.
Strangely this hasn't happened in the UK, plenty of people trying to wish it into existence though.
An average of 30 people a day are arrested for offending people over the internet (according to the Mirror)
The government regularly unpersons disagreeable people.
I really wish it wasn’t happening, as it stands I am not going to move back.
The hate speech laws are just badly written for the online age, which is a problem but they are not going to result in the fall of democracy.
They are catching what would normally be bigoted comments someone makes to their mates down the pub (or maybe in their WhatsApp group) and because it was posted to the world on Twitter it counts as inciting violence.
The police obviously can't investigate all potential infringements so now they have to pick and choose what they do enforce. And inevitably the ones with the most noise get their attention.
The people that do get caught up in this said something nasty they should have kept to themselves. Not something to be arrested for in most cases, but it's not an attack on free speech either. Just a badly constructed law.
Not really sure what "regularly unpersons disagreeable people" means. Shamima Begum is the only one I can think of recently. She got made an example of so a load of copy cats didn't go and join ISIS whose goal is to destroy the western nonbelievers (including the UK). Unfortunate to be made the example I suppose, but it is not a regular occurrence.
>> I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
Come on. You really think the UK has moved further towards authoritarianism in recent years than the US?
It's a close competition, but the US seems to have a trump card.
I don't trust the UK government either. But I'm both British and Australian and I see the need for a centralised identity service.
Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity. Then – lo, would you believe it! – they get hacked, and now all of our data is in the wild again.
I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me because may I remind you they issued the documents, had some way of that company querying my 'verified identity'. They might do it by me providing, say, an ID number string which is looked up. That's all they get: my ID number. In return, they get confirmation that I am who I say I am.
Oh by the way I already have at least 2 of these ID numbers as an Australian citizen. My aforementioned passport, and my driver licence. Both of which I know I should keep 'private', lol, but if I want to interact with the world in any meaningful way the reality is that I spray these digits – along with my date of birth and address and whatever else they ask for – all over the goddamned place.
But sure, centralised identity is bad.
Your mistake is assuming good faith on behalf of the government who arrests thousands of people for social media posts. Beyond faith, they are incredibly incompetent and this data will be stolen.
Just because it’s social media doesn’t excuse inciting violence or hate speech. I’m not going to claim that every arrest in the UK due to social media posts was just, but I also disagree that social media should permit unrestricted speech.
They didn’t arrest anyone for “making social media posts”. The police (not the government) arrested people due to the content in the posts breaking an existing law. Big difference.
You miss GP’s point. They’re not assuming good faith, they’re pointing out that the government already knows identity credentials and can, encrypted or not, quite easily correlate digital activity with those credentials.
The question isn’t whether the government can/will identify and track you. They do, in good faith or bad. This is unfortunate and attempts to allow them to decrypt or acquire additional data about citizens’ activities (like chat control) should be opposed, but identity/activity tracking is omnipresent and irreversible.
The question is whether identity credentials should be available which reduce the risk of additonal credential theft or bad-faith action (e.g. by other entities stealing non-secure-for-digital-use credentials like passports).
Why do services need to verify identity?
What service needs a solution to verify identity that doesn't already exist?
Banks do KYC now. Employers already need a National Insurance number to employ someone. Benefits get paid to a named payee. Emergency healthcare needs no insurance and waiting lists come via a GP who indeed knows me.
What service needs a further centralised deposit of power over identity?
In Australia (and many other countries), we need to KYC when we get a new mobile plan. This makes sense: you can do a lot of criming with a 'dark' phone number.
Predictably enough, then...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Optus_data_breach
> In September 2022, Australian telecommunications company Optus suffered a data breach that affected up to 10 million current and former customers comprising a third of Australia's population. Information was illegally obtained, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, telephone numbers, email contacts, and numbers of passports and driving licences.
Yes, all of these services. Plus a ton more - hotels, car hire, various government digital services.
For example I get married abroad and I need to change my name, if a system was present I could just go to a website, enter my request, identify and then wait for my new docs to arrive, all while staying abroad.
But it’s even better - banks / employers don’t need all of my information all the time, thy just need to verify that I am who I say I am at that moment, so the credentials I am giving them through a digital system can reflect that. Call it requesting a scope from a government openid system.
And I have the power to revoke that.
And all of the various little government agencies don’t need to request all the documents to bootstrap trust every single time, they can just be given a convenient (timed) access token by me.
Implemented right, it gives much less data to people in a much more convenient and secure way. I guess the “implemented right” is the problem.
But maybe that’s an orthogonal thing that needs to be solved by itself? How we have an independent central banks that doesn’t (shouldn’t) succumb to the whims of governments - they have a clear narrow mission and they are supposed to follow it regardless of what an administration would want.
If we had an “auth provider” government thing that’s mission might be more closely aligned with the population, giving a government _just enough_ data to make it efficient but so it cannot abuse it.
Built in adversity and distrust is how we finally got a government to “work” with the separation of powers and all of that, maybe we need to think about improving the political system with some know how from web tech, cause I think working efficiency, effectively and reliably in an environment of mistrust is what web tech is known for.
> Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity.
I really really really don't want to 'verify my identity' everywhere. Why the F is that normalised these days?? If I buy something online my payment and delivery address is all they should need. And all they've had to have for the last 30 years
> I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me because may I remind you they issued the documents, had some way of that company querying my 'verified identity'.
Um yeah but right now they don't know what you do with your life all the time. Anna have absolutely no business to.
As an adult, you probably need to authenticate yourself in the following situation.
opening a bank account, getting a credit card, getting a mortgage or a loan, buying a flight ticket, signing up for internet service, signing for mobile services, buying a concert ticket and the list goes on.
What's common here is the service provider need to know you are actually the person say it is you and not someone else.
Back in the old days where we apply the service in person, you can take your driving license or passport to authenticate yourself, but with myriad of services now moving online, we need a centralised system that mimic the physical ID.
For a flight ticket I just ID myself at the airport so that's not an issue. For concert tickets I don't need to do this now. For internet service I absolutely don't need that, all they need to know is that I pay.
And mortgage, bank etc I just do on premise of course. These things are rare and important enough to warrant to just go there.
Given the ongoing "age verification" fiasco, I'd be quite wary of giving UK government any more digital powers. They don't seem to be any good at using what they have.
Yeah age verification is another such idiocy. The EU is starting this BS as well. Great way for conservative politicians to make a name for themselves with their backers, but other than that it's not effective at all, considering the torrents are full of this stuff with no gating whatsoever.
Besides, parenting is the parents' job.
> If I buy something online my payment and delivery address is all they should need.
That's what verifying your identity is for. The payment. This cuts down on fraud. My credit cards often require me to enter a code they text me for a purchase to go through, when it's somewhere online I've never shopped before. That's confirming my identity. And my credit card needed my identity originally to look up my credit history, because they're literally loaning money.
Businesses want to know who you are to reduce fraud. Otherwise people input stolen credit cards, the charges get reversed, and the business is out of merchandise and money.
Obviously if you pay in something irreversible like Bitcoin then a business generally couldn't care less who you actually are, as long as there aren't any know-your-customer regulations (like if you're a bank or the address is in a sanctioned country etc).
The "credit card" model for buying stuff seems to be flawed. When you give some company your credit card number and CVV to buy something, they could always turn around and give the number to someone else.
The fix is very simple, but requires more interaction: (1) You ask merchant for stuff (2) Merchant sends you a "money claim" (3) you sign your money claim (4) the merchant takes the signed claim to the bank (5) the bank verifies the signature using your public key (6) bank transfers the money to merchant from your account
Absolutely, credit cards are insanely insecure, everything that is needed is written on it. I don't know why we are stuck with this archaic American system. They patched it with a form of 2FA (Mastercard 3D Secure / Visa whatever) but it's still really patchy and in many cases is not even triggered at all even for big purchases.
But here in Europe we have much better payment methods like iDeal in Netherlands and Bizum in Spain (now going pan-EU with Wero)
That's basically how PSD2/SEPA payment flows function in Europe if there is a functional eID system. I think I've used such a system for nearly a decade now.
Airlines and airline middle-men organisations are the worst offenders and centralised identification is not going to help there. Having flied with a few airlines, your details are out there. In the UK, national and travel passport are the same.
That's true. I remember Karsten Nohl's presentation about this at 33c3 and not much seems to have improved.
https://securityaffairs.com/54969/hacking/flight-bookings.ht...
We need to clearly define some stuff around Digital ID, since people seem to be using the term for distinctly different things.
There's (1) eGovernment platforms, where you can handle government-related business online using a login. There's (2) Digital ID cards, where you can use your phone in place of a physical ID or drivers license in real life. And then there's (3) full EU-proposed-style Digital ID, where government wants to act as a SSO provider for private online services, like social media.
Yet someone can be rightfully criticizing (3), as it would pose a major risk to online privacy, and someone else barges in with "here in [place] we have a great eGovernment platform which is very useful for filing your taxes online, I don't see why you'd oppose that". Not specifically in this thread, it's been noticeable over almost all Digital ID-related discussions in the past. Please be considerate of that.
This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK.
"This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK."
For people who are already working illegally, or plan to, it would change nothing, as they could dodge any checks by sub-contracting through someone who seems to be legally employed.
The government cannot be so daft as to ignore how much illegal work happens this way, so there has to be some larger scheme at play here.
There are already systems to check immigration status "Right to Work" in the UK that employer can use to check any immigratants current status.
If (2) being mandatory means that you need an Android or iPhone in order to work or do anything you need an ID for, then I refer to my basic stance whenever this kind of crap comes up:
Tying citizen's rights to acceptance of Alphabet or Apple's Terms of Service ought to be a crime against humanity. It would also be a bad idea for a sovereign state to give foreign corporations so much power.
It would be proper to offer a physical (smart)card version as well. Like most countries with an eID do.
The suspicion is that the government will introduce it as (2) but it will be extended to replace physical ID, especially as the government has discussed making driving licences digital. On top of that once introduced it is likely that you will need to provide ID for more things, possibly including (3).
The thing that frustrates me the most about digital ID cards is not themselves on merit but rather modern Labour's political abilities.
Like, the UK economy is stagnant, there is a cost-of-living crisis, and Labour needs to present the public with an alternative to Farage. And the answer is... digital ID cards?
Completely agree. I'm not too bothered Digital ID cards, I was mildly annoyed by the idea of actual ID cards (manly the cost) but as a free digital app, I don't have many objections. I've seen it from colleagues in Denmark. If they manage to build in some zero knowledge proof of age I might even support it.
But how this is supposed to stop immigration, illegal or otherwise, is beyond me.
I think about 90% of immigration to UK is legal so it won't. Seems like a huge expense when money is really tight
Why should we stop immigration?
I mean it's obvious to anyone who isn't an idiot that we shouldn't. However, populist parties banging the drum on this are looking likely to be at least the second biggest party in the next general election (and that comes with some wishful thinking given the recent polls). Labour's approach seems to be to validate their scaremongering but to claim they can deal with it without going full on Third Reich...
Oh, yes, I understand. Yeah, if this is meant to speak to Reform voters, it’s really unclear if it actually makes sense to them or anyone if this is actually an immigration thing.
Starmer seems to be under the impression that Labour needs to focus on immigration to stave of Reform. This is a mistake because most people don't really care about immigration as such, they care about cost of living, health care, and basic things like that. Research and polling in many different countries over many different years have shown this again and again and again. People like Farage like to present "one easy answer to all problems politicians don't want you to know!" First: EU, now: immigration, next: gingers?
Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.
Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.
All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.
I completely agree with you.
I feel like there are two things... one, do Reform voters even understand that Digital ID is a response to immigration? It's not clear to me that they even do.
Two, obviously immigration is not the issue. As I understand, Starmer is going to attempt to mount a serious counter-narrative to Farage. I really hope that his answer will not be "look, we hate immigrants too!" They tried that a few months ago, didn't they? The whole "island of strangers" Enoch Powell thing. I hope that that was as bad as it gets.
If you want to improve the capacity of the state to deliver services and improve the lives of citizens, being able to easily tell who is who across a range of government departments is a pretty good place to start.
I wonder how we survived for a hundred years before that
We survive but with the caveat of people getting scammed for billions in every noteworthy currency there is, for starters.
I would hope they can do more than one thing at a time. On the economy, £30bn of tech investment was announced last week.
You're right. Another positive note is Miliband's stuff with energy -- my understanding is that they are doing mostly the right things and succeeding in the political battles they need to win.
But there's also the issue of selling this to the public. The stuff you and I are talking about is quiet, probably because it's not sexy. The digital ID thing is loud and prominent.
This is why "green new deal" is a good idea -- it's a loud, good way to sell the public on something they'd otherwise fail to understand.
Just today Switzerland said YES to E-ID
https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/202509...
50.39% yes. Wow, that's the closest I've seen here.
With a mere 49.55% turnout.
But fortunately "Use of the e-ID is voluntary..." in their case. Whereas in the UK it's being pushed as a (for all intents and purposes) mandatory thing.
The labour government can not be challenged in any serious way until the next election in 4 years. Petitions don't really do anything, they will just say "no" to what the people ask for and move on with their agenda.
It is disheartening to see this country follow the same path the US took, it seems as our politics become more polarised, the team sports aspect means we start seeing parties push through agendas while putting their fingers in their ears. It's so easy for a politician to point score by shooting down dissent as "the other side thinks this is bad, so it means it's good".
The stated goal of Digital ID is to reduce illegal migrants from working, getting housing and using services. The obvious issue here is that they don't use traditional means to do this today, and it won't change with the introduction of this. They already hide from the state.
If we had decent opposition they'd try to kill this by mandating it HAD to be used for voting, which Labour will absolutely not want.
I would say 95% of my friend group were not born in this country, and the changes this government are making are pushing them to want to leave, and they are here legally, they have high paying jobs and skills and they feel unwanted.
For the first time in my life it seems like it makes sense to join them.
The most cynical part is that Labour spent years accusing the Tories of wanting to do this, then introduced it themselves, dressed up as a way to cut migration. And now, if you oppose the ID, they smear you as being pro–illegal immigration.
This is some very impressive politicking and exactly why many people don't trust the mainstream political parties.
The immigration angle is a total fraud. If they wanted to do any of the things being implied they could have done so ages ago, they don't care. it's true that the ease of accessing the grey economy is a pull to the country but you can just... not let them in.
edit: an interesting example of this that I find quite fascinating is that the amount of automation in things like car washing is declining because the automatic ones are being undercut by quasi unregulated alternatives that don't clean up the chemicals properly and so on
The second most cynical part is that the Tories spent years trying to do this and now claim labour authoritarian dictators for doing it.
Regarding tackling illegal immigration the issue is that there are already ample and sufficients checks mandated by law so this would not change anything. Indeed the main issue is that there are dodgy employers and landlords who simply flunk the law and would oviously continue to do so and ignore Digital IDs all the same.
Digital IDs would also be de facto mandatory for the majority of adult residents based on what they would be required for despite the government very clumsily saying otherwise.
The government is simply being dishonest here so that should arouse suspicion...
> Indeed the main issue is that there are dodgy employers and landlords who simply flunk the law
I'm surprised that this is your framing, I don't think I would hesitate to offer a willing tenant or otherwise good employee a job because of their legal status. Mostly just on principle, it's not my job to be an arm of the state and I resent being deputized. They're physically here in my town, better they have somewhere to live and a means of supporting themselves rather than being homeless. If the state wants to find and deport them they can do it themselves on their own time.
You have rushed into commenting without carefully reading what I wrote or knowing the context.
In the UK, by law employers must check that the people they hire have a legal "right to work", i.e. are citizens or foreigners with the relevant visa. In England, landlords must check that prospective tenants have a legal "right to rent", i.e. are lawful residents. Penalties are hefty fines and up to jail.
Hence "flunking the law".
I mean, that's kind of how the political system works in both the UK and US, and is not exactly a new thing. Often the "real" opposition are the backbenchers of your own party, rather than the opposition party.
The really rough part is that while the Democratic Party in the US is a weak slightly-left-of-center party, the Labour Party in the UK is basically a right-of-center party with decreasing amounts of daylight between them and the Tories.
In particular, there is no major political party in the UK that supports trans rights, which is devastating to that community there.
(On the plus side, so far as I can tell, with the Reform party to absorb the true fascists, there are fewer of them in the two major parties in the UK. ...With the downside being that Reform is doing distressingly well these days.)
It's becoming increasingly confusing to me who any of the parties actually represent.
The more left leaning people I know are foaming at the mouth over how Labour have operated since being elected, all moderates (outside London) I know tend to lean Conservative (though that party seems to be AWOL since the election) and the only party I hear that is gaining any popularity is Reform, and they are doing so at an alarming pace.
4 years is a long time, but it seems inevitable its a two horse race between Reform (given polls I have to presume not everyone who votes for them is a racist twit) and Labour, and Labour seem hell bent on alienating any one who isn't centre-right, and they have to contend with Reform for those votes. Maybe it's politicking to a degree I don't understand, but it seems like a very odd strategy.
For those outside the UK look at this chart to see how fast Reform are rising:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
> and Labour seem hell bent on alienating any one who isn't centre-right
Raising the deficit massively more than the predicted massive deficit raise is definitely not a centre-right-pleasing move. It's just to buy all the NHS worker votes.
> In particular, there is no major political party in the UK that supports trans rights, which is devastating to that community there.
I believe this is incorrect. No party has said they have any intention of removing "gender reassignment" as a protected characteristic from the Equality Act. This law provides protection and offers legal recourse from being discriminated against by employers, service providers, and so on. Which, to cover those individuals with this characteristic, is the most reasonable consensus interpretation of "trans rights".
The Liberal Democrats seem (from a quick read of just this article) to have thrown out a proposal to water down an existing trans rights policy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0vvle9w7zo
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There are (almost) no fascists in reform. You think the fascists will join a party whose second in command is "Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf"? They're all in Homeland or other serious nationalist parties if at all.
Reform are basically a joke amongst the "real" right (by which I don't mean neo-nazis but anyone with any actual beliefs)
This appears to be backfiring spectacularly. It is a shame in many ways because a decent digital ID system would be very beneficial. The problem is the approach is completely wrong. There are already 10+ competing ID system which are now largely digital. A solution on how to bring all that together done well could make things significantly more secure by reducing the attack surface and make it much more reliable.
Instead it looks like they are going for 1 more competing system, the implementation of which will be steered by politics and ideology rather than technology and technical requirements.
Prediction:
> The Government has no plans to stop the introduction of Digital ID cards, and is working closely with companies to implement it as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
Signed, but I guess it is gonna be one of those where they keep asking until they get the answer they want.
Where is the counter bill to block all future attempts of such privacy invading bills. Can the public draft new legislation like that? If so please ensures it blocks any dependency on smart phone ownership or other bigtech services.
Unlike the ludicrous US system with a "written constitution" that basically means a handful of unelected people get to overide all laws and say they're just "interpreting" as they ignore the plain words, the clear intent or any other obstacle to their Imperial Decree, the Parliament is literally Sovereign.
So, if Parliament passes a Law tomorrow, miraculously by unanimous consent saying "The UK shall never have Digital ID" and insisting it denies itself any ability to make a law introducing such a thing - at any point it can also, despite that, pass law making a Digital ID by the narrowest majority, for example the day after.
In fact not so very long ago this exact farce played out. The Liberal Democrats were in a situation where they could either join a coalition with the larger Conservative party and form a government or they could say "No" and likely the populace has to do another election. Popular understanding was that British people hate elections, and so if you insist on another one they will punish you, the Lib Dems did not want that. But, they were concerned that the Tories would betray them (predictably)
So hence the 2011 "Fixed Term Parliaments Act". But although the Act says you can't just end parliament without a term ending, obviously Parliament can just pass a new law saying nah, changed our mind, which is what the 2019 "Early Parliamentary General Election Act" does and then the 2022 "Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act" undid the whole pointless mess.
Parliamentary sovereignty might be able to take on limits via some sort of tradition over a long period. For example perhaps if Parliament had stuck with that Fixed Term rule for a few hundred years - it'd settle as "Just how it is" and there'd be a serious argument that you can't just pass a law saying just this once as an exception we'll hold elections early. But "It was a few years ago" clearly doesn't cut it and that's what you would need for such a "counter bill".
The best you can hope for is a pledge by politicians, which is worth slightly less than a piece of paper you wrote it on.
The best you can hope for is an armed, educated population with principles. The constitution doesn't guarantee anything, it's just a receipt.
After seeing NUMEROUS video of UK police showing up at doorsteps like the gestapo, arresting or citing or intimidating people who are simply practicing free speech, I don’t think anyone should support the government with a pathway to de-anonymize the web. Even if you support the current government, such powers will be used against you at some point.
Tweets - prison
Assaulting and trying to stab a man burning a Quran - Suspended sentence
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xr12yx5l4o watch the video and tell me this man should be A) not in prison and B) in the country after said prison sentence
Any young man would probably get an attempted murder charge for that. Very incendiary ruling; sort of thing that could start a riot.
Policing by consent admits an arbitrage whereby one simply refuses
Anarchotyranny
If you're looking for evidence of the UK gov's authoritarian tendencies, you don't need to go looking at videos on Youtube, just look at the number of arrests of peaceful protestors who were given charges under terrorism legislation for holding up banners or wearing T-Shirts mentioning "Palestine Action" (ref https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/25/fate-of-hund...).
Or indeed in one notable case the person who was arrested for a T-Shirt about "Plasticine action"
They're supporting a specific group that went into a military base and damaged military equipment (that was irrelevant to palestine/israel), those people going out with those T-Shirts know exactly why the group was proscribed and are seeking to be arrested, why are we shocked they got arrested, they wanted it.
Put it this way, the UK managed to get through the troubles, which had a lot of events far more serious than what Palestine action have done, without needing this level of policing of free speech.
The point I was making is that successive UK gov's are tending towards authoritarianism, the current one included.
If you're trying to convince Brits not to enact these policies "you guys made it through The Troubles" is a really bad argument unless you're very unfamiliar with the body count and terror and the public perception of that period in British history. (it included some fifty thousand casualties and sixteen thousand bombings)
An advocate of these policies would quite literally argue that not getting into something like The Troubles is the point and a lot of people would agree if that was what is on the horizon.
Can't say as I agree there. I was in the UK at the time (lived here all my life) and I'm fairly familiar with the horrors of the time.
My point is we were able to get through something like that, which was very serious, without needing to proscribe free speech in the way that's being done now for some people putting paint on planes.
So if we didn't need it for something that serious, we don't need it for this.
Maybe those people are trying to make the point that if the government can, without public scrutiny, declare any organisation as terrorist and then arrest anyone who wears t-shirts mentioning that organisation - then the government has way too much power.
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Damaging military equipment responsible for defending the country for a political goal is terrorism. They attacked the state.
... "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims."
No. It's. Not.
But even if you disagree with the dictionary and me. These kind of nuisance resistance acts have happened countless times in the past without serious punishment.
They're taken for what they are. It's only recently, as we move towards something darker, and laws created for actual terrorism begin to be used against the citizens.
Perhaps you're the kind of wanker who welcomes that.
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You'd do well in 1930's Germany. Apt.
Those creatures destroyed supplies meant for Ukraine.
That’s because Palestine Action are a proscribed group.
Whether or not the proscription was correct is irrelevant, the current law means that you commit the same offence showing support for IS or the Terrorgram Collective.
The police can’t simply ignore one proscribed group over another as that leads to all manner of weird and wacky outcomes.
The legislation which causes anyone expressing support of a proscribed group is the authoritarian thing I'm talking about. The Terrorism Act 2000 as implemented is the problem.
Having a law that means merely expressing support of a group, leads to criminal charges is not something I think should be in place in any country that pretends to support freedom of speech.
But they're only a proscribed group because the cabinet decided it was politically convenient to proscribe them.
It's not like these guys are the Taliban or the IRA, though some of them did chuck some paint on some planes.
So a person who is worried about Starmer's authoritarian tendencies lay responsibility for the police action at the door of number 10.
They destroyed "drone and aircraft machinery" [0] at APPH and at Teledyne "damage to the clean rooms could halt production for up to 12 months" [1].
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-57403049
[1]: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/pro-palestine-activists-dama...
That's an argument for arresting and imprisoning a bunch of people for criminal damage, not an argument for proscribing an entire organisation and limiting their free speech.
The argument here is not the PA should be let off scot free. The argument is that proscribing them as an organisation is a massive and authoritarian overreaction to their actions.
I should have included the quote I was responding to: "some of them did chuck some paint on some planes."
Is that inaccurate? Unless the goal was to strike terror into the hearts of some insurance companies, in what way does the scale of the damages affect whether this organisation should be proscribed? Should we be proscribing Bernie Madoff next?
"chuck some paint" is a deliberate misrepresentation.
It misleadingly describes the scale, coordination, and intent. It uses a minor detail to trivialize an act explicitly intended to reduce military capacity.
Is there any scale of paint chucking that can realistically represent a terrorist threat? Is there any scale of paint chucking that should lead to proscription? Because that's the key point here. It's not "can they be prosecuted for paint chucking?" (yes, obviously), or "can their paint checking escapades have serious costs or ramifications?" (sure, lock them up!) it's a question of whether their actions constituted such a grave threat to the safety of the United Kingdom that the only way of dealing with that was to make it illegal to even support their group.
If we as a country are so at risk from paint chucking that we're resorting to proscription as our tool of defence, then we have some serious issues.
Although PA was bundled in with two other organisations in the vote, the vote did pass 385 votes to 26, so it seems there was broad support across MPs, not just the cabinet.
You're only looking at the symptom, not the cause.
Who is doing the proscribing?
/rhetorical
I'm actually very pro israel and i agree with you on this. It's "two tier" kier at his finest. Labour have demonstrated they have no problem using the police and judiciary to go after anyone who causes them problems. And they somehow convince themselves they have the moral high ground from which to lecture everyone else. Even conservatives with all their indifference and contempt for the British public were never so dishonest.
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I wonder how much you're loading into "simply practicing free speech".
The last one that made the rounds here ended up being carefully cut to give a specific impression (and the initial presented commentary straight up lies), and when the "full story" came out it turned out to be a lot less "simply practicing free speech" than implied.
But retractions never get the same visibility, and it's already made the impression they wanted the post to make.
Not a great site but gives the gist:
https://www.newsweek.com/british-police-explain-video-office...
Might not be what you're referring to, but: a couple of months ago a user posted this comment [0] claiming the linked video showed police offices arresting and threatening to jail an old grandmother in the middle of the night, simply for "liking facebook posts the gov doesn’t like"
Needless to say there were no arrests, no jail time, not even threats of jail time, it was 1:30pm, the woman was 54 years old, and she had posted comments calling for a councillor's resignation.
There's an argument in there about whether councillors have a bit too much influence on local police behaviour. But it gets drowned out by hyperbole, embellishment, and an over-eagerness to link it all up to a nation-wide conspiracy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593022
In many cases the “free speech” genuinely is racial hatred bordering on incitement.
But on the other hand there genuinely have been many people arrested (and in some cases convicted) under these laws for statements that are shockingly milquetoast.
I agree. There has been over-reach, especially between 2005 and 2016. The Robin Hood airport incident is a good example. But I'm not convinced we're sliding into authoritarianism. Or at least, if we are sliding into authoritarianism then it's more likely because of restrictions on protest (e.g. Serious Disruption Prevention Orders) rather than policing of social media.
> But on the other hand there genuinely have been many people arrested (and in some cases convicted) under these laws for statements that are shockingly milquetoast.
Care to name some?
The vast majority of cases I've looked into end up being a lot more than the initially presented "They Were Arrested For Saying Bad Words On The Internet!" story pushed on the internet.
In fact, I can't remember a single one where there wasn't a lot more, but that's not really more than anecdote.
Here's one - happy to hear about the lots more:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
A number of people have been arrested, charged and convicted for things that were very obviously jokes - tasteless jokes, offensive jokes, but still just jokes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dankula
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/glasgow-bin...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-46959556... is one example of a successful prosecution.
There are many more cases of harassment by the police or arrests, the most recent example that comes to mind being Graham Linehan. These are clearly not as bad as prosecutions, but still create a chilling effect.
Linehan was arrested for inciting violence. He encouraged people to punch trans women.
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It is a criminal offense in the UK to use insulting words in public, or to send any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive (whether any one does or not is irreverent).
The Online Safety Act and Hate Crime Provision have extended these somewhat into the realms of 1984. But the police do tend to use them sparingly.
> It is a criminal offense in the UK to use insulting words in public, or to send any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive (whether any one does or not is irreverent).
This is categorically untrue.
Public Order Act 1986
"insulting words or behavior that cause distress to others"
Malicious Communications Act 1988 (Section 1):
"Outlaws sending messages, electronic or otherwise, with the intent to cause distress, or anxiety"
Communications Act 2003, Online Safety Act 2023, hate speech, terrorist legislation all made these many orders of magnitude worse in many ways.
You cannot be arrested for sending “any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive”. That’s not what the law says. You can be arrested for spreading hate speech, inciting violence, sending illegal media or harassment online.
All of the arrests mentioned in this thread in relation to these acts have been campaigns of intimidation, harassment and calls to violence, not simply saying something “insulting or offensive”.
In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts (look carefully who wishes to abolish the ECHR).
> All of the arrests mentioned in this thread in relation to these acts have been campaigns of intimidation, harassment and calls to violence, not simply saying something “insulting or offensive”
This is false. But even if it weren’t, it would be unjust. Determinations like “hate speech” are subjective, and have no place in law concerning speech. Without free speech, there is no democracy.
There’s a big difference between being free to criticise the government and those who define and enforce laws, and being free to say anything to or about another citizen without repercussion, even if it may cause them harm.
The people mentioned here who were arrested due to violations of the communications acts are definitely the latter. The people arrested in peaceful protests for being associated with Palestine Action or Just Stop Oil are the former.
>In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts
This is categorically untrue. Not only is the ECHR worded specifically to allow individual countries to curtail free speech ("any law, deemed by the local democratically elected government as ; necessary in a democratic society, and for a legitimate aim"), but parliament always had sovereignty to pass into law exemptions to the ECHR, which we have done on multiple occasions.
Yes, this is why the government needed to label Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. It needed special measures because it did not in fact have the authority to arrest protestors, even though some people found what they were saying offensive.
The Terrorism Act 2000 was a knee-jerk reaction to the Good Friday agreement and used to make association a criminal offense.
The police are overreaching massively. They are making 30 arrests a day and "interview" many more.
We do not rely on the ECHR to protect our free speech. If we did the UK would no longer be a democracy. I'm offended by the suggestion that our democracy and society is so fragile that without them we would have no rights. Expect a police raid very soon.
The "30 arrests a day" or "12000 arrests a year" stat is wildly misleading. I've addressed it before here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488099
I think you're being disingenous. There is clearly an unprecedented and systemic effort to police social media. Even if the posts did actually violate the law doesn't change my point or address my concerns. This is not what the police should be doing.
I honestly don't know if that's true or not. But I haven't seen any compelling evidence to support it. The figures being lobbed around by the likes of Tommy Robinson are deeply harmful to the debate because they are both a) completely wrong and b) misleadingly quoted. You can lookt the actual stats here: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...
We're talking on the order of a few hundred arrests per year for section 127 of the Communications Act and 1500 per year for the Malicious Communications Act, which includes stuff like racial harassment, domestic abuse, pedophilic grooming, and a whole host of things that I would hope you agree should be illegal.
The latter part at least is true. Sending "grossly offensive" messages is illegal under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Section 127:
> a person is guilty of an offence if he—
> (a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
> (b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
I suspect the former is also true, but am not well-read in that area
The full wording of the text is:
> A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—
> [F1(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,]
> [F1(b)causes such a message to be sent; or]
> (c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
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> “Grossly offensive” is absolutely not the same thing as “any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive”.
There is no statutory definition of “grossly”, so in effect it is the same. There is prior art for it being interpreted incredibly widely.
Not to mention the other incredibly vague adjectives in the law.
> Correct
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html “Don’t be snarky”.
>> There is no statutory definition of “grossly”
If this concerns you I would advise not looking into pretty much any UK law which is full of subjective terms and ways to interpret them. The law isn’t an algorithm nor should it be. Just because you can’t understand how it works doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
There's no value in making insults for the sake of being insulting protected speech, but in the UK if you're making ECHR Article 10 protected speech that someone happens to find insulting or offensive then that's not a crime. It's unhelpful to permit insults as free speech to prevent some hypothetical future abuse, since all modern dictatorships pay lip service to free speech and instead lock up their political opponents for embezzlement or mortgage fraud or whatever.
*irrelevant, not irreverent. ffs. (meaning people can be charged with a crime and only a fictional 'reasonable' person suffering offense or insult)
Look, I didn't mean someone should actually burn down the building with the occupants still inside. It was satire!
Go watch the videos and look up what was said. Most of them are clearly normal non violent free speech, but just politically not aligned to the current government’s platform. I’m not saying all are just doing free speech but am confident about most.
In my experience, when someone has an extreme opinion and says "just watch this video", it's largely a waste of time. Video is too easily game-able as a medium.
Good thinking, you wouldn't want to expose yourself to extreme opinions.
Come to think of it, when are we going to ban dangerous assault thoughts? Not everyone has a mind big enough for radical ideas of that caliber.
I'm open to a broad range of opinions. I'm less open to arguments hinging on watching a video. Especially if they won't even link to one.
AIUI "practicing free speech" is mainly a US thing that doesn't map cleanly to other countries.
It should
Why?
What is actually going on with that? It feels like over the last 2 years the British police have decided to see what it's like being the stasi. Most of the msm are faithfully avoiding mentioning how authoritarian the police have become. The odd thing is they are not even necessarily propping up a political regime, although again it feels like they are getting some of their instructions directly from kier starmers mind, but they are arresting people for being mean on twitter. It's really odd and no matter what side of the political divide you are on you should be disturbed.
I think it would be nice not to have to prove identity and address repeatedly with lots of paper utility bills. As for abuse by authority: well don't elect a populist party then. If you do it won't matter what defenses you think you have.
Utility bills as verification have always been weird to me. How is that actual proof?
I can't see how that doesn't cut off more of the populace than having a national ID would. Assuming it's an issue as mentioned a few times here in comments.
I don't understand the problem. How is this different from all other identifiers, physical or digital, that most goverments already have?
The likelihood that it will become tied to your bank account, credit file, etc in a way which isn't currently possible with physical forms of id such as passports and driving licences.
I’m pretty sure UK security services can link bank accounts to you already. Hell, credit score companies like Experian already do it.
This is beneficial for public services and companies that need to identify you. Having a single ID for a person is a huge improvement. As an example, when we got married, my wife was simultaneously both her maiden name and my surname. There is absolutely no link between passport, birth certificate, driving license, etc.
You have to go around to all these different organisations and have them update the details. They all have different requirements for updating the name.
Having a single consistent mechanism for referring to a person in systems seems hugely beneficial for both the organisation and the person.
Some may say this strengthens individual privacy and the inconvenience is a price worth paying.
How isn’t that currently possible? In America, your bank is already required to keep a semi-permanent record of your state issued identification for anti-money laundering/terrorism financing reasons.
I can see concerns about it becoming a widely used form of SSO, potentially even mandated, and that destroying privacy. However, banks and credit are cases where you already do not have that privacy, so they don’t seem like a very compelling example to point to.
In the UK, your bank will have a copy of your id to prove they carried out basic id checks - it currently ends there.
The bank can, will and do report transactions to the government as well as annual interest etc to hmrc - as far as I am aware they use national insurance numbers in those reportings.
That didn't really clear anything to me. These things are already connected. "The likelihood" is just handwavy concern but it doesn't tell me anything about why is this a concern for this system specifically. I still don't see what makes this system different.
Don't banks demand your National Insurance number already in order to open an account?
To me it's a question of benefits vs drawbacks. In my understanding ID cards are beneficial for 1) Running government services 2) Fraud prevention 3) Some immigration control (as at least some reason why people try to migrate to UK is lax document checks) Some people argue that it's somehow becomes authoritarian, when you have an ID card. I personally don't buy that as most of us have already passports, NI numbers etc, so all the security cervices if need be have access to that. Obviously if people start to engage with hypotheticals, that these cards will be used to check whether you can access internet etc, I agree, that would be dangerous, but that is not being proposed. Also the argument that implementing it will take a lot of money and will never be done is not a convincing one, as in that case one should not really try to do anything in this country.
No details of course, so also see the 38C3 talk on EU digital identity wallets[1] which came up in the EU age verification app thread[2]:
– Authenticate RPs: no over-asking
– Unobservability: keys on user devices
– Selective disclosure: minimal attributes
– Unlinkability: ZKP-based anonymous credentials
– Deniability: designated-verifier ZKPs
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-eu-s-digital-identity-systems-re...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359074
Have any of those petitions ever changed anything? I might as well shout 'I don’t want a digital ID' down the toilet, it’d be just as effective. And that’s coming from someone who’s against digital IDs.
> Have any of those petitions ever changed anything?
What's the alternative? Not do anything and hope things change by themselves? Has that worked in the past? Is doing something than better nothing?
Well, 2 million plus have signed the petition and 90% of those people will go along with the scheme when it is introduced - because it will be convenient to do so.
Tell me how you plan to survive living off-grid whilst standing firm against it.
Signing an online petition isn't better than doing nothing and is arguably worse.
Japan has a digital national ID ("MyNumber" is the name). There was a lot of pushback before it passed but it did pass. It is now the main ID that is used for national health insurance and other government services. The rollout has been rocky with bugs and whatnot, but in the past 2 years or so there's been no drama. The ID is now supported in iOS and is coming to Android soon too, so one can have their ID on their phone instead of carrying around a physical card.
Cyber risks notwithstanding (they concern me greatly), I still think the Gov is better placed than Private sector to guarantee citizens privacy and security (at that level). Why? The Gov is better placed to be the ultimate non-profit org: can fund, can legislate, can draw expertise, is non-profit etc.
Treat the digital ID as critical national infrastructure, or else it'll fail massively.
Not surprising the country is heading down this direction. Once worked at a school briefly, everything is heavily monitored and low trust. If you are new you have to show a certificate showing you have nothing on your record and ID such as a passport. Then you need a badge that you need to wear at all times or else have a staff member with you at all times. You are never allowed to use your phone unless in staff room. You must sign in every time you enter the building and sign out when you leave. Anything can be said about you and land you in HR. Everyone is like a walking CCTV.
This is the future for broader society as the government has no trust in its citizens and believes the only solution is to monitor and control. The above will just be extrapolated where it can.
Give the government your name, postal address, email address and citizenship information to store on a government database in order to protest against the government having your name, postal address, email address and citizenship information to store on a government database.
At this point, I have no confidence that digital ID cards won’t be plagued by fraud, exploited by malicious actors, or misused in ways we can’t yet foresee. And beyond that, there’s the very real risk of government employees abusing the system for personal gain.
Until there are stronger guarantees protecting individual freedom and privacy, I can’t see a system like this as trustworthy.
Keir Starmer is trying to sell this to public with the promise that it will curb illegal immigration. But by how much? And if that target isn't met, will it be rolled back? It always amazes me when governments hold themselves to such a low standard, and just fall back on "if you don't like it vote it out" while not recognising that the signal of a vote every 4 years can not meaningfully extract consent on this particular issue.
Representative democracy sucks, it just sucks less than everything else we’ve tried. Plebiscites on specific issues are terrible: that’s how we got Brexit and woke up the next day astonished that our neighbors had been so daft.
Brexit is an interesting case to bring up. As someone who voted against it, it is also clear to me that it hasn't been implemented in any way that could have made it a success from the representatives, and looks like a clear case of the representatives maliciously complying with a decree that they didn't agree with.
I remain unconvinced that we can't do better than a system of government that is over 200 years old that only exists as a function of the technology at the time.
It's difficult to understand how one of the least popular governments of recent times are going in hard on one of the least popular policies (in the UK) in recent times.
Distraction. You're debating the policy now, not the people.
I’m a bit surprised that this of all things has received over 2m signatures already and yet we (the UK) have been passing far more dangerous legislation recently where the general public didn’t seem to care.
I wonder if it’s because “ID cards” is an issue that has been around for some time and is perhaps more easily understood than other erosions of privacy and freedoms that are a more subtle.
That's exactly it.
Slightly Off Topic, the whole petition site is running on Ruby Rails.
On the Topic, If Digital ID is required, what could we do to limit the scope of it to absolute minimum? Or do we have a way to have digital services from Tax, Driver Licences etc without some form of Digital ID. Or could we have Government Services System SSO without Digital ID?
> We demand that the UK Government immediately commits to not introducing a digital ID cards.
I can imagine that the grammatical error is now keeping whoever wrote that awake at night.
We've all been there. My heart goes out to this poor soul.
Is there a technological way to make an ID that's anonymous and irrevocable (since arguably people should never lose citizenship)? Because digital, national ID has major benefits (prevents fraud, reduces paperwork), but yeah, those are IMO larger drawbacks.
"ID" and "anonymous" are exact opposites.
Not necessarily, by "ID" I mean certificate that proves you're a citizen, adult, and owner of [specific thing] (to a service that manages [specific thing], without letting them deduce anything else you own). That can be done without identifying you e.g. via ZKP.
Although the ID should also be irrevocable, yet could easily be stolen...
Perhaps the solution is to give local municipals (e.g. neighborhoods) the power to generate, revoke, and authenticate IDs. The textbook surveillance state seems to always be a large organization; neighborhoods can be problematic, but I suspect it happens less often, because they're much easier to influence (and overthrow the "leaders" of) than big governments. So e.g. if a national bank wants to know if a user's provided credentials (name, address, etc.) are accurate, it asks their city such a user is one of their residents; the city knows what services the resident uses and can (if malicious) block them, but the government can only track the services of all residents in a city, and must block entire cities (which, if they band together, require smaller numbers to challenge the government; in a large country like the US, there would be extra layers such as states, so that no layer significantly overpowers a group of several of the layer below).
Ok put it this way- IF we go to Any Other Country to Work- We are Required to Speak that Language Fluently & Have Proof of ID - it should Work Both Ways.
No doubt it’ll be an open source app you’ll be able to recompile for your non Android/iOS computers. Otherwise I really hope to government gifts me an ID computer.
Digital IDs are a solution. What are the clear problems statements? How can you show that Digital ID solves them? What problems do they also introduce?
As a Brazilian, it's pretty weird when I see that countries like UK or the U.S don't have national IDs.
Here that would be seen as a completely insane.
Has (everyone) having an ID stop crime?
I didn't even mention crime. Not sure why this question.
Obviously it doesn't stop all crimes, probably helps on some.
Just saying how there is a very different culture, where no one see having an ID as something weird and invasive.
It almost feels predestined for this to not solve the problems at hand, overrun on costs and timelines (furthering the first point), in no way streamline existing processes or cut costs, leave behind parts of society, and present security vulnerabilities that can be capitalised on through either social engineering or malware (also furthering the first point, only now citizens will be accused of tax fraud)
I hate to be pessimistic and there are elements of the idea I like, but when reflecting on the issues at hand this feels like popping the toaster because you smell burnt toast, but the rest of the house is on fire
Indeed. It'll be a gravy train for one of the usual big consulting companies. Billions of much needed cash will be wasted and nothing of any value will be achieved.
This ID system is touted as somehow stopping illegal boat crossings (the current political hot topic in the UK) because it will apparently somehow stop illegal work. This is obvious nonsense. Employers are already supposed to do ID checks and face heavy fines for employing illegal workers. Illegal employers obviously don't bother with such checks and pay cash in hand. They will continue not to bother doing any such checks, with or without ID cards.
A great deal of illegal work is actually caused by arm's-length employers such as food delivery apps and other similar platforms. These companies already do fairly robust ID checks. What happens though is people rent out their accounts (often for surprisingly small amounts of money) with the ID check already passed to illegals who actually do the work. The problem is nothing to do with ID checks, it's the fact that the employer never sees the employee in person and doesn't verify on a day-to-day basis who is actually completing the work.
France, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and India already have government id. However, this being hackernews there will never be a link to a well researched article on the pros and cons of introducing id cards (digital or otherwise), only conspiracy theories and confident declarations that id cards are a surefire symbol of authoritarian states. I don't know what I think, I lack sufficient knowledge to have an opinion. But I still know approximately 10,000x more about UK politics, economics and immigration than 99% of the people commenting here.
France Identité app is closed source, requires GMS and Play Integrity, and is only available on closed stores. It is not yet mandatory but who knows when it'll happen. No thanks.
The root of the issue is a mistrust of a Govt that has suddenly decided to rush through something, that was never discussed prior to the election, on the grounds that it will tackle illegal immigration, which it clearly will not.
Oh hell yes
two million signatures lets gooooo.
Finally some inspiring movement on this front.
It’s a lot of signatures but the petition against the Online Safety Act got 500k and the response was basically just “lolno.”
What’s the point of democracy if the people say no and the government does it anyway?
Kier Starmer seems to have no idea how he's coming across. Everything he does just makes him look more authoritarian. He's doing this right after passing that "online safety" bill. It's remarkable that the only time he got his act together was in sending anti government rioters to prison in record time. Which only goes to show what he can do when he wants. The palestine action thing is another one. They embarrassed him so now they are being arrested in their hundreds. It's really not a great look for him at all. But he seems blithley unaware of this. I imagine he's confused because his entire social group of enlightened progressive elites tell him he's amazing and he doesn't understand what the plebian class are complaining about.
He's the ultimate product of a dysfunctional civil service; what else could be expected other than dis-empowering people, ignoring democracy, and increasing bureaucratic power?
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Are you suggesting A&E should not treat you if you are unluckly enough to land on your phone as you get run over etc? Or that prescription fraud cost anything close to what the government will spend implementing a major new IT system?
> Are you suggesting
Unironically a majority in the UK would say they "are demanding it happen"
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