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

Brazil has a similar system (gov.br), which provides access to almost everything you might need from the government, including notary services, public healthcare records, driver's licenses, consulate services abroad, income tax, social security, unemployment benefits, welfare benefits, and more.

I also understand the privacy argument that arises from consolidating all these systems, and I'm generally pro-privacy, including in some extreme cases. However, this service makes life so much easier across many dimensions of daily life, and I think it's worth it. I can only hope that the GOV.UK login achieves a fraction of this.

One Login is an "authentication" system, an oAuth provider with identity added on. This means you can prove your identity once (to various levels of confidence, as defined in GPG45 [1]), and use that same verification across different government services.

When people talk about a national ID system, they're often talking about some form of "authorization", i.e. proving that you are entitled to certain things.

There currently isn't a system in the UK that can definitively prove that you have access to every service. For example, even being a British citizen and having a British passport doesn't automatically entitle you to access the NHS.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/identity-proofing...

Government website login isn't really a 'digital ID' is it? I've never thought of it like that anyway - could be used as one, maybe, but it isn't currently. E.g. you say this would help the NHS - well gov.uk login isn't any different from NHS app login is it? So the NHS already has 'digital ID' too.

(Don't expect this to solve multi-computer-system NHS though, ha! That's been tried and failed how many times, for how many billions? At least we have the app now, such as it is, I suppose.)

I don't think so. I think it raises peoples' hackles because it is "not something we do here" - English-speaking countries seem to not go with mandatory ID in the same way as continental Europe. Maybe a Napoleonic/Common-Law thing?

(Personally, I don't object to the idea).

There are several reasons. I believe, many would acknowledge that it absolutely has good sides. But there are worrysome sides. As I life at the moment in Switzerland I know a little bit about the discussion there:

The implementation of an E-ID could just not good. In Switzerland people voted against E-ID already once and I believe now everyone agrees nowadays that it would have been an bad bad implementation back then (too much reliance on external companies). The same was true e.g. for Covid Certificates. The different implementations around Europe had different qualities and e.g. Switzerland ended up with one of the better (or maybe best) ones, where the identity of people were protected.

Let's just take the example of voting. It is already hard to explain to people that voting works as intended. Look e.g. at the US were I've the impression people do not trust regular voting anymore, despite having people from other countries checking if voting works correctly in the US. But overall it is a system almost everyone is able to understand. But the moment you bring cryptography into the game it's over. 99% will never ever understand why they should trust this. And honestly I feel with them. There are a lot of software people here and we all know how awful our whole industry cares about security overall and how critical software components depend sometimes on a few people. At least the whole implementation should be open source, everything else should not be tolerable.

What I have the impression most people fear, is not the E-ID itself, it is how it will be misused. Suddenly websites will now request verification for dubious reasons. While it is not the case with a regular ID, it will be trivial to do so in the future. The same with mass surveillance, it was not practical before internet, now it is, so governments do it. I think here comes one of the main arguments against it people would bring up, there is no simple instrument for people how they can fight back in case they dont like to identify with their E-ID.

To some degree there is mistrust in government (in Switzerland less then in Europe I believe) for very valid reasons. But still e.g. in Switzerland they had records of many people years ago. After the whole topic came to the surface it was a debacle and new laws were created to explicitly forbid this. E.g. in Switzerland it is not allowed by law to just store some information because are from the left-wing or right-wing (just regular left-wing/right-wing, not extremist), just as one example of something simple. Despite of this government still started to do again. Several newspaper requested this information, which now has to given out, and found it, despite being against the law, the government is doing it again. This kind of thing you can find for other European countries as well, and for the US I assume I don't even have to start.

Then what about people without Internet? At the 38C3 in germany last year was a presentation about this topic (Don't remember the full name, just that is is somehwere on https://media.ccc.de/c/38c3): that we always think it is just the old people, but this is not true.

Sure you could argue, that people give away they privacy willingly anyway, but I'm not sure if this a good reason to argue against all the suspicious some people have.

Here an article from a Online newspaper in Switzerland, tough its German: https://www.republik.ch/2025/08/29/ein-klares-jein-zur-e-id

At least in Switzerland I believe, if they just slightly would change the law it would benefit everyone. E.g. that in case an internet page expects an E-ID, that first it needs to through (a probably costly) evaluation what data is really, really needed, with many privacy experts at the table, to always reduce it to the absolut minimum (the E-ID has this feature to be even better than an ID regarding this). Additionally that there must be e.g. always a possibility to somehow call and have a possibility to do it without E-ID.