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> Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing. Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does, if you emigrate from the UK to Switzerland, does anyone feel they've now entered a fundamentally new relationship with the state because of an ID card?

What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay?

> If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute, and the standard actually demands that those requests are ephemeral. Can anyone tell me why that's worse than some patchwork of private verification industries who leak your data every two months or sell them to god knows who?

Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

> Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from unifying data?

Absolutely.

>What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay?

no, therefore it doesn't meaningfully change the relationship to the state, unless one agrees that those countries are somehow qualitatively different than the UK or before they had IDs. The author tries to appeal to fear and is being dramatic. Arguments along the lines of "this will fundamentally change X" are just rhetoric to use people's scepticism of change. It's the same kind of thing you see in US politics when some politician goes "and they'll take your freedoms, and your meat, and your guns" regardless of what the actual legislation says

>Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs, and to be honest I trust an (ideally open) algorithm more than a random person. Just a year ago[1] a cop was caught sniffing around in a database and stalking women under the guise of police business. So if you ask me, eliminating people from data processing is a feature.

[1]https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on-ove...

>because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs

Isn't that problematic because all Timmy has to do get his hands on booze is to lay his eyes on someone's ID? I don't see how the scheme is any more secure than validating the order wasn't placed with a prepaid credit card (presumably only adults have access to non-prepaid credit cards). It makes much more sense to do the verification on delivery, rather than when you're placing the order.

It's not that easy. To use someone's electronic ID as verification you either need their ID card and their ID pin code and probably access to their computer as well or mobile phone (+ access to it) and their ID pin code.

> Absolutely

Would you please give some substance to your message?

> Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

For one, it doesn’t scale. The average sales clerk is not qualified to correctly identify a valid ID. IIRC it takes about three months of training for someone to be able to do that, it also requires time and tools (at least a magnifying glass and an UV light).

>National identity needs to be tracked in any country, regardless whether you have an ID card, and all the systems the UK has in place prove that point, the card doesn't change anything other than actually guaranteeing some standards and safety and consistency and providing some utility.

There are advantages in making it harder to request id. Imagine a world where any website or app can validate your identity by tapping your national id on your phone/tablet/computer (via NFC). I would think every website is going to start asking for your national id for account creation or login, for "security" and "anti-fraud" purposes of course. We already see this with phone validation for major services (eg. google, outlook, twitter). At least with phone validation it's not directly linked to your real life identity, and you can get burner phones.

Belgium has an eid card which is an older version of just that: Put the card in a smart card reader and type your 4 digit pin.

In practice it is used almost exclusivelt by governements, e.g. login to tax on web. Healthcare also uses it. I did as an experiment use it to log myself in on a personal website. Wasn't hard to set up.

The sky hasn't fallen here.

Italy has a digital identity provider (SPID) and certified email (PEC, which is basically email + digital identity) and only government websites, bank and insurrances use it. It is much better than the alternative in the UK, where you either visit a branch in person or send a copy of your ID (passport or driving licence) together with proof of address (a bank statement), hoping they won't leak the documents at some point.

Not necessarily. Integration with the id infra is a hassle and entering your pin (adding a cryptographic proof to the tap) is a ux obstacle. Only organizations that really benefit from that in terms of risk reduction will do that. Speaking from experience in Estonia.

If you think surveillance and/or governmental action as a whole is unethical, then it only follows that you'd be against any streamlining or increasing efficiency of said systems. If a government does evil things -- and governments do evil things pretty often -- then the rational conclusion is to muddle the bureaucracy and make it as ineffective as possible.

> Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does

Virtually (or maybe absolutely) every undemocratic country on this planet has national ID cards. China, a bastion of repression does, Syria does, North Korea does, Russia does.

> If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute

Versus the "substantial erosion of civil liberties" senior officials of the British state admit will occur from a national ID.

In the UK we already have sufficient identification for all purposes, we don't need more. I also have experience of the current identify systems and they do not unify identities as well as you think they do, and any attempt to do so has failed. This proposal is only to enrich American IT consultancies and we don't need any more of that thank you.

We really don't.

To prove who you are you need a driving license, or a passport, even if you are not planning on using either for their intended purposes. Both cost money, and if you don't spend extra money (which a lot of people may not have) to get a full driving license, require renewal fees.

Otherwise you need to have x number of documents from 1 list, and y number of documents from another. And hope that you've got them, or bad luck.

It's honestly a nightmare when you get older and places don't even accept a birth certificate and bills going online. A lot of places don't accept PDF printouts of bills too!

You think an id card would be free?

And you do not get any benefits either. UK could drive identity theft to effectively zero, reduce the pandemic by moving mundane transactions online, reduce carbon emissions by making electronic signature widespread etc. etc. Yes, this would allow for privacy infringements. No, this has not happened in countries where such things are commonplace. Quite the other way around: since identity is vague and fraud rampant, service providers hoover up data to manage their risk. Since lack of identity means no meaningful interoperability, hundreds of copies of your personal data float around waiting to be sold. How is all that giving people more privacy?

  >Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing...

I think it's similar in a way to the argument in the US about the right to bear arms.

In the UK there's a similar kind of "inalienable right" feeling that we [as citizens] are not the property of the state and therefore are under no obligation to carry a piece of paper which identifies us as if we were a piece of state property. Theoretically in the UK you do not even have to give your name if asked by the Police, unless you are under arrest.

There's also an association of ID cards being symbolic of totalitarian regimes, viz. the Nazis or Communist Russians of so much popular culture, grim-faced and eternally demanding "Your papers!"

You can argue that in the form of Driving Licenses / bank cards / work ID cards, most people here are already carrying ways to prove their ID when required and that an officially issued card wouldn't make much practical difference, but the stigma against a state issued ID card still remains.

Yes, the UK state has implemented far more egregious privacy violations than a national ID card.