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Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

reuters.com

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Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#141

Post by anal_reactor »

TheChaplain wrote: post #129
rich_sasha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The small boats crossing are a small fraction of immigration. Some Google number claims 37k people got in this way in 2024. With net migration hovering around 0.8-1m people per year, arrivals must be well above this number (surely some people are leaving, making the net number smaller). But even then, this is less than 5% of the legal immigration, and probably a lot less than that. I'm not saying it doesn't need addr…

Uhm are you sure about those numbers? 0.8m is like on the average a whole county in the UK, and such massive influx would destroy the housing- and job market. Not to mention pressure on schools and healthcare.

The actual number is like half of that because while 800k people came, about 400k people left.

I am an immigrant myself but I start to think that such policies are short-sighted. The end result is often fragmentation of the society, because immigrants rarely truly integrate, and at some point they become the majority, and then you're effectively a minority in your own country. It takes at least two generations for newcomers to become fully integrated, and that assumes things going right.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#142

Post by calcifer »

arrowsmith wrote: post #86
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #80

I didn't watch the video, but have read other reports, and it's worth noting that the context for this is the Labour Party conference, which starts on Sunday. The UK govt are under pressure from the tories and Reform to do something about people entering the UK from France by crossing the channel in small boats. Nothing much seems to be working. So this announcement is about trying to control the narrative by making…

“Nothing much seems to be working” because the government is completely unserious about stopping the boats and is unwilling to do any of the things that might actually work. They could stop them in a week if they actually wanted to.

What are the options legally available to them? They have their own experts, but it sounds like you have a novel idea that hasn't occurred to anyone before.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#143

Post by Nursie »

angulardragon03 wrote: post #124
Nursie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving. At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy. And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive an…

The counterpoint to this is obviously that the requirement to present ID to vote is tantamount to voter suppression - iirc there is no “free” form of ID in the UK. As an ex-Brit I am also used to carrying an ID and a drivers license, and I’ve always found it quite weird that you can’t get an ID card of any kind that isn’t a full-fledged passport or a drivers license.

I mean I guess this new thing is going to be free?

I also don't live in the UK any more, still a brit and not yet Australian, but I have had to adjust to it being necessary to carry your license here when driving. It means I can't really leave home without my wallet, which is odd. We're getting electronic licenses before long though, hopefully.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#144

Post by monerozcash »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #99
monerozcash wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.

So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?

That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.

So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.

I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#145

Post by arrowsmith »

Digital IDs will be used to restrict your internet access.

They'll roll them out gradually. You won't need one at first. You'll still show your passport, driving license etc, until one day you give up because the digital version is convenient and you "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? Have you got something to hide?

Then they'll attack the easiest target: porn. We already have age-verification laws, implemented through dodgy third-party providers. But now everyone has digital government ID: we "might as well" unify things so all the porn sites check your age using the centralised government system. What's your problem? Why do you care? Won't you THINK OF THE CHILDREN??? You want to let CHILDREN watch PORN???

Then comes online retail. After all, the Southport killer bought his knife from Amazon — that was the front page headline on every paper, remember how organic and uncoordinated that was? It could all have been avoided with better age verification. And hey, we already have a way to verify age with our digital IDs. We "might as well". What's your problem? Why do you care? You want to let CHILDREN buy KNIVES?

And what about social media? Kids shouldn't use Facebook, it's bad for them. Australia already bans under 16s from social media. We already have age verification for other things. We "might as well". WHY DO YOU CARE????? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!

Oh, that's handy, everyone's social media accounts are now tied to their real identities. That'll come in handy when people say nasty things that the government doesn't like. After all, those riots only happened because of "misinformation". Why do you need to stay anonymous anyway? What's the problem? Why do you care? Got something to hide? You're in favour of HATE SPEECH??

The slippery slope has never been more lubricated.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#146

Post by monerozcash »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #44
remarkEon wrote: post #21

>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK. How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited…

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.

> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents

For criminals it is already essentially impossible to forge new polycarbonate documents. Acquiring them by defrauding the application processes remains easy however.

Of course, if the person checking doesn't know what the real document feels like in their hand, whether it's real polycarbonate or a shit laminated TESLIN fake makes little difference.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#147

Post by sunshine-o »

Insanity wrote: post #25
remarkEon wrote: post #21

>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK. How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited…

In all fairness, the “immigration” story is likely just a convenient spin on a more realistic goal of state surveillance on it’s own citizens.

Yes and keep in mind that while the common law abiding citizen feels like he is living in the 1984 novel, most governments have no idea who is actually walking around, a resident or citizen in their countries. It is now anywhere between a 5% to 20% error margin in "the west".

Worst I knew for sure of a specific country which had no databases of who was currently imprisoned, with inmates just walking out. Yes, it is that bad.

At the end it can just be viewed as an IT problem, the same way most corporations have multiple CRM and have been working on "a 360 view of their customers" for decades. Even most licensed, audited banks have those types of error margins if you really asked them to provide a clean list of their clients.

So all we hear about Digital IDs is a marketing term for the new version of that database they are working on.

A lot of countries were already collecting fingerprints when issuing IDs decades ago. But those projects fails like most CRMs.

So now the UK and others are arresting people for Facebook posts because it is actually a good database. Probably way better than their actual fingerprints or criminals databases.

I am not sure if you should be terrified or just not care about those announcements.

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#148

Post by mechanicum »

remarkEon wrote: post #21

>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK. How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited…

I don’t think so, no. This is how it works today: https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work

If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.

If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.

Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).

Re: Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

#150

Post by OhMeadhbh »

carlosjobim wrote: post #76
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the cops stop you on the street and ask for your digital ID and you can't show it to them, they'll take you to a deportation center. #PapersPlease

From Wikipedia: "Tourism in the United Kingdom is a major industry and contributor to the U.K. economy, which is the world's 10th biggest tourist destination, with over 40.1 million visiting in 2019, contributing a total of £234 billion to the GDP"

Like the US, I think there are multiple interest groups, not all of whom are interested in seeing "aliens" on British streets. I was named a "Highly Skilled Migrant" by Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and paid a fair amount of money to the University of Liverpool and yet, never got the feeling I was in any way anything other than a foreigner.
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