UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards

Obviously it doesn't stop all crimes, probably helps on some.

Just saying how there is a very different culture, where no one see having an ID as something weird and invasive.

To take an example - would I want the current US government to be better at compiling information across all its agencies / departments? Absolutely not. What it does with its current level of consolidation is authoritarian enough that I'm not moving back there any time soon. I hear similar sentiments from my Hungarian colleagues, who are quite familiar with competitive authoritarianism in their own country.

Of course, this mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. I don't trust the US government, so I want it to be bad at its job - but then it's bad at its job, so I see it as ineffective and bloated and continue to mistrust it.

IMHO the only way out of this spiral is the hard way: a system must do the hard work to show itself trustworthy, and it must do so _before_ people will entrust it with the information that would make the job of being trustworthy easier. As with human relationships, it takes a _lot_ more work to repair trust than it does to break it. Unlike with human relationships, you also have systemic factors: the system needs an unbroken series of good, principled leaders; it needs to visibly and credibly punish corruption, not turn a blind eye; it needs to de-escalate divisions, not inflame them; it needs various institutional safeguards to work properly, not chop away at them; it needs to allow meaningful dissent and criticism, not crack down on it; it needs to learn from expertise, not undermine it.

Most importantly: the system needs to learn from its failures, and adjust the rules and incentives of the system itself to prevent those failures from recurring. This is generational work.

What service needs a solution to verify identity that doesn't already exist?

Banks do KYC now. Employers already need a National Insurance number to employ someone. Benefits get paid to a named payee. Emergency healthcare needs no insurance and waiting lists come via a GP who indeed knows me.

What service needs a further centralised deposit of power over identity?

You can safely replace the UK with any other government and it will stand. Likely the UK one just desperately trying to push dividing issues in order to distract from what really matters to the UK citizens.

Or they are just inherently stupid and just do what they are told. Its unfortunate what the UK governance degenerated into.

For example I get married abroad and I need to change my name, if a system was present I could just go to a website, enter my request, identify and then wait for my new docs to arrive, all while staying abroad.

But it’s even better - banks / employers don’t need all of my information all the time, thy just need to verify that I am who I say I am at that moment, so the credentials I am giving them through a digital system can reflect that. Call it requesting a scope from a government openid system.

And I have the power to revoke that.

And all of the various little government agencies don’t need to request all the documents to bootstrap trust every single time, they can just be given a convenient (timed) access token by me.

Implemented right, it gives much less data to people in a much more convenient and secure way. I guess the “implemented right” is the problem.

But maybe that’s an orthogonal thing that needs to be solved by itself? How we have an independent central banks that doesn’t (shouldn’t) succumb to the whims of governments - they have a clear narrow mission and they are supposed to follow it regardless of what an administration would want.

If we had an “auth provider” government thing that’s mission might be more closely aligned with the population, giving a government _just enough_ data to make it efficient but so it cannot abuse it.

Built in adversity and distrust is how we finally got a government to “work” with the separation of powers and all of that, maybe we need to think about improving the political system with some know how from web tech, cause I think working efficiency, effectively and reliably in an environment of mistrust is what web tech is known for.