“We have no hesitation in making the national identity card scheme an unfortunate footnote in history. There it should remain – a reminder of a less happy time when the government allowed hubris to trump civil liberties.” That was then home secretary Theresa May speaking in 2010 as she scrapped the previous Labour government’s multi-billion pound ID scheme, following a Conservative election campaign that included a pledge to “reverse the rise of the surveillance state”.
Only last year, the Home Office minister Baroness Williams told parliament that the introduction of identity cards would be “prohibitively expensive and would represent a substantial erosion of civil liberties”. What a difference a year makes. Under the guise of the coronavirus pandemic, the government has announced plans to create online ID cards and a digital identity system to “revolutionise the use of data across government”. Although the Times reports that the details have not been finalised, under the proposals people “will be assigned a unique digital identity to help them with such tasks as registering with a new GP”. Pub owners, the article suggests, “would be able to digitally verify drinkers’ ages”.
Given recent events, you’d be forgiven for being sceptical about the government’s ability to deliver its ambitions. More than £11m has been spent on a failed contact-tracing app. The test-and-trace scheme was launched unlawfully without a privacy impact assessment. A decision to use an algorithm to grade A-level students led to widespread protests. And then there’s the establishment of a frankly dystopian array of secret agreements to share vast amounts of our personal health data with tech corporations, one of which has been accused of facilitating the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
It isn’t just the recent response to the pandemic that does little to inspire trust. In the space of a single week in April 2019, the Home Office had to apologise to both EU nationals and Windrush citizens for data breaches involving hundreds of people. Nor is the picture rosy in other nations with fully fledged ID systems. In March 2018, a data leak from a state-owned company in India allowed anyone to download the private information on all holders of an ID card, exposing their names, unique digital reference number, information about the services they used and even their bank details
People often ask why objections to proposed ID systems in the UK have historically been so strident when such schemes are widespread in mainland Europe. What gets missed when the debate revolves around pieces of plastic is that these systems tend to entail massive centralised government databases spanning entire populations. Introducing one in the UK would fundamentally reshape our relationship with the state, making it far easier to access records across a whole host of different agencies – health, tax, immigration, education, and so on – and linking previously siloed and purpose-limited datasets to build up an intimate picture of almost every aspect of our lives. And, of course, the simple existence of many of those datasets – the gangs matrix and the Prevent database to name just two – is already highly controversial.
Combined with biometric records and facial recognition, a digital ID system would take us perilously close to the state being able to track and record huge amounts of information about all of us in real time. This isn’t the stuff of fantasy: in Pakistan’s “smart cities”, for example, facial recognition-equipped CCTV cameras are integrated with the national ID database and a SIM registration database. What’s at stake therefore goes well beyond our privacy rights. When people know they are being watched they change their behaviour: a nationwide digital ID system could put at risk our freedoms to protest, strike, organise politically, practise our religion and express ourselves freely.
This isn’t about a philosophical position on privacy. It’s about who the government shares our information with, and how it treats us based on what it thinks it knows about us. In the UK, the hostile environment has ushered in increasing demands for ID as a requirement for accessing basic goods and services like housing, banking, work, and the NHS.
As well as violating the rights of the people that it targets, the policy has essentially been an experiment in using secret data-sharing and matching to automate the process of shutting people out from everything they need to live a dignified life. History tells us that the list of those who fall foul of the government of the day is rarely fixed for long – one need only look at the treatment of political dissidents, Muslims, people claiming benefits and trade unionists over the decades to imagine who might end up on such a list in the future.
We shouldn’t blithely accept a digital ID system as a necessary evil in the modern world. There’s a lot more at stake here than being able to buy a pint more conveniently. Why not press for the one option that is all too often overlooked: rather than massively increasing state and corporate surveillance capacity in a bid to make ID checks easier, what if we simply got rid of some of them altogether? For starters, hostile environment checks – such as making landlords and banks check people’s immigration status – could and should go.
The coronavirus pandemic has magnified a whole host of urgent issues that we must as a society prioritise. An intrusive, expensive and unjustified identity database simply isn’t one of them.
• Gracie Mae Bradley is policy and campaigns manager for Liberty
