Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

bigbrotherwatch.org.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 152 posts

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#101

Post by octo888 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #64
maleldil wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always felt weird to me in the UK. As a foreigner, I have to carry my passport anyway, but how do citizens who don't have driving licences identify themselves in day-to-day life? Say they get carded at a pub?

You don't have to carry any form of ID in the UK and there are no ID cards, anyway. That said, obviously most people have their driving licence on them. As a foreigner you do not have to carry your passport. No-one is going to ask for ID unless you are doing something specific at a bank or government office, for instance. Or, indeed if you are trying to buy alcohol or cigarettes anywhere and look very young... But yo…

> That said, obviously most people have their driving licence on them.

Just to point out for the wider audience: you're not legally obliged to have your driving licence on you either when driving. You have 7 days to produce it a police station

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#102

Post by mikelward »

afandian wrote: post #73
tokai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works. No need to call it great. Just the other month 35.000 danes lost access to their digital id because their phones are running too old android. There are edge cases where people get locked out of the system without access to public services, and why it is resolvable it can result in missed benefits and inturn missed rent payments. I myself have experienced being between housing, and wasn't able to access my d…

Do you have more background links? Did it cause a national dialogue? Did anyone in government take accountability for that?

I think it's probably this:

https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/about-mitid/news/soon-you-can-no-...

They removed support for Android 9. Affected devices would not be getting security updates either.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#103

Post by hunterpayne »

somelamer567 wrote: post #23

My wife who is from a large mainland European country, has an ID card. Everyone has one and they're mandatory. It makes it trivial to prove your bona fides and is good for air travel within the Schengen area. Her ID even has a chip which can be used to create digital signatures for situations where rock-solid proof of identity is required. Amazingly, they've always had ID cards and the world hasn't ended. These count…

Counterpoint...the UK government is already jailing people for voicing opinions they don't like. You are basically saying that this is OK by you. This can be abused very badly by bad actors in the government. It is also one of the things we criticize China for. Becoming like an authoritarian system isn't the solution for opposing authoritarian systems.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#104

Post by owisd »

HK-NC wrote: post #46
lyu07282 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK politics is very simple: People have a lot of economic grievances and they are frustrated. People are made to believe that the source of their problems are immigrants/non-white people. So for a lot of people in the UK, anything against immigrants, even more drastic measures, are worth it and it makes the government appear to do something about their problems. Nothing ever really gets better of course, but they hav…

Fair to add that, despite every winning party promising reduced immigration on some level, and everyone that wanted to remain in the EU rightfully annoyed that Brexiters were simply voting because of migration, nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard.

> nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard

Net migration in the UK dropped by 400,000/yr in the last year and they’ve toughened the criteria further so seems unlikely it won’t drop further.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#105

Post by lyu07282 »

HK-NC wrote: post #46
lyu07282 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK politics is very simple: People have a lot of economic grievances and they are frustrated. People are made to believe that the source of their problems are immigrants/non-white people. So for a lot of people in the UK, anything against immigrants, even more drastic measures, are worth it and it makes the government appear to do something about their problems. Nothing ever really gets better of course, but they hav…

Fair to add that, despite every winning party promising reduced immigration on some level, and everyone that wanted to remain in the EU rightfully annoyed that Brexiters were simply voting because of migration, nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard.

It doesn't really matter, people's grievances won't go away because those have nothing to do with immigrants anyway. They will just move on to the next scapegoat.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#106

Post by alecco »

In completely unrelated UK news:

Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/20/uk_palantir_defense_p...

204 points|rntn|4 days ago|134 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45313793

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#107

Post by Lio »

Labour (and the Tories before them) seem to be pushing very hard to stop any anonymous internet usage in the UK with the justification that the government knows best and have a duty to track everything we do[1].

I really wish that they would instead at least consider strongly improving our rights because it's highly likely they will loose next general election and the incoming government will not be "good actors".

Sadly, instead we get Baroness[2] Thangam Debbonaire rolling her eyes on Newsnight at any critism of what they're doing.

Labour need to stop making these petty unforced errors that don't deliver but instead just piss people off.

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68625232

2. She was made a Baroness to keep her in power after she was voted out as an MP at the last election because, again, the government knows best.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#108

Post by username332211 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #32

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…

> 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.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#109

Post by basisword »

martinald wrote: post #15

The UK already has (various) digital IDs but this is the 'new' one https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login . So what's going to be different? Just making it mandatory? I can see some justification (sorta) for not making it mandatory, but saying it won't improve citizens lives is complete rubbish. Having one login for all government services would massively improve the efficiency, especially if other department…

How would this solve the disparate NHS systems issue? The NHS id exists and is used by all of them. It's the various systems with no central data repository that is the problem. Throw in the fact that Scotland and NI have completely separate NHS's again and I don't see how another id ever solves it. The solution is bringing the NHS in all regions into the 21st century - which costs money they don't have.

Re: Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID

#110

Post by n4r9 »

physicsguy wrote: post #39
stringsandchars wrote: post #34

OTOH - partly playing devil's advocate here - I'm dealing with several bank and inheritance-related issues in the UK from my home in Sweden now, and needing to do pretty much ANYTHING with an authority in the UK feels like stepping back into the 17th century. There's a constant requirement for paperwork to prove who I am - always in the form of items that are 100% digital nowadays in the Nordic countries (like a "uti…

> There's a constant requirement for paperwork to prove who I am - always in the form of items that are 100% digital nowadays in the Nordic countries (like a "utility bill" or a "credit card statement" - on paper, posted by snail-mail to my home address!) These are always digital in the UK too. When I did my mortgage application I had to go to my bank, ask them to print me out a statement and then stamp it to 'verify…

I'm in the process of renewing my mortgage. Both my and my wife's banks allow you to export the most recent statement as a PDF, which we passed to the broker and have had no complaint. Same thing with the initial mortgage five years ago.
Post reply on HN