Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

So there are a number of digital IDs, but the problem is they are not really joined up or all that useful.

In principle, there is nothing really that wrong with a digital ID, as at the moment you have a bunch of UUIDs (mostly) so its not actually that hard to marry you up between departments.

In practice, what they'll do is hire accenture or some other dipshit company, spend _billions_ re-inventing a cross between a passport and oauth2, and it'll fail hard and be horribly insecure.

The better option is to tie everything to your government gateway ID (the thing that lets you renew passports, talk to the HMRC online, and a bunch of other services)

View on HN

> In principle, there is nothing really that wrong with a digital ID, as at the moment you have a bunch of UUIDs (mostly) so its not actually that hard to marry you up between departments.

It depends. Here's a nice example for you - A while ago the BBC ran a series on council house investigators and their cases. It was very clear for it, that councils don't routinely check whether a prospective council tenant (who'd eventually become a buyer) doesn't already own a property. No checks are done with HMRC for their income levels either.

Of course, if a future government just wants to round up dissidents and send them to camps, I'm sure it won't be that big of an issue. But as of right now, this is enough to stop routine fraud prevention, which is likely an immediate threat to far more people.

> No checks are done with HMRC for their income levels either.

I'd have to look it up, but some level of background checks are explicitly banned by the RIP act. It was put in place to allow local councils to "snoop" but only in defined situation. (for example if you have noise complaint, the council can't make a recording, but they can accept a recording you make.) but on the other hand they sometimes can inspect your bins to make sure you are not mixing waste streams.

> Of course, if a future government just wants to round up dissidents and send them to camps,

The UK constitution is pretty vulnerable to this. However, even a strong written constitution isn't going to stop that if it becomes socially acceptable.

If this is an argument > In practice, what they'll do is hire accenture or some other dipshit company, spend _billions_ re-inventing a cross between a passport and oauth2, and it'll fail hard and be horribly insecure.

then we'll never do anything in the UK and we should all just give up on changing anything.

Also, btw the passport renewal is done without government gateway ID.

> btw the passport renewal is done without government gateway ID.

Fuck its driving license isnt it?

Side note, driving license is an ID that carries a £10k fine if you don't update your address in time.

Thats the frustrating thing, GDS could have done "digital ID", and were kind of doing that already. When I came to renew my passport, I could use the photo I had on file from my driver license(or it was the other way around). Absolutely wild.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com