| |
|
Now, the way I interpret Blunkett's proposal is that the UK ID card would replace items 1 and 2, and possibly act in conjunction with 3. National Insurance have details of my current job, my current address, how much I earn, how much I pay in social security contributions, etc. The NHS card entitles me to access the health system and related benefits. I might be seeing this a bit naively, considering that I have only lived in this country for 5 years, but isn't this the information the proposed cards would require? Add the collection of a photo and you've got the basic premise for your ID card.
First off, 1 and 2 are not ID. I don't carry either of them, in fact I don't know where either are. They're not actually necessary to either pay National Insurance or receive healthcare, for a UK citizen at least. Blunkett's card proposal would be wider-ranging than that - you would have to present the card to receive any sort of state benefit, unemployment, whatever. Now, apart from the cost of doing this and the rather doubtful idea that it would stop fraud significantly, that's not too bad. However...
There is no communication between the government departments regarding the information held in connection with your card... The information you generate is held by the government department responsible for that brand of information and it is not communicated to anyone else unless there's a damn good reason to do so. Being a suspected protest organiser is not a good enough reason.
...the problem is that I in no way trust the government to keep to data privacy laws, or, in fact, to draft them properly in the first place. Consider two possible alternatives. Firstly, the police have no power at all to demand to see your ID - in which case, it's a bit useless as an anti-crime measure. Secondly, and more probably, they would. (Considering there have already been moves to do such things as making it illegal to cover your face during a demonstration, unless you're in the police of course, in which case you're deliberately unidentifiable.) I am in a protest. I have my ID number recorded. A few months later, I'm stopped for speeding. The cops, checking my ID, find that I'm on a list of possible anarchists - they decide to search my car for drugs. Later, I apply for benefits. I'm still on the same list, and my application is treated with great suspicion. And so on. That's not even to allow for the possibility of mistakes (and there are a great number of mistakes that are found in this sort of data) propagating across the whole system. Look what happens with credit records - if you get mistakenly blacklisted, you suffer for it for years. The whole point of this card is that it does imply the sort of centralised record-keeping that your ID card apparently doesn't. You can't have a general work/healthcare/benefits/etc card that doesn't work like this.
the UK would need to take a long, hard look at the mechanisms the rest of the EU countries use, consider it's iffy record with regard to data security and develop control and supervision mechanisms that would put the public at ease.
Indeed. And until the UK government does this, and convinces me it's entirely changed its ways, I'm not going to believe them, and I'm not going to support any moves to implement it. There's too much evidence that they have an incredibly, and possibly deliberately, lax attitude to data security combined with inefficient error-prone record-keeping. |
|
|
