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

At this point, the benefits of an official governmental digital ID system exceed the drawbacks; the argument against digital identity documents died a long time ago with the total loss of privacy due to the amalgamation of all existing systems combined with the ubiquitous tracking of physical and online presences; that horse has bolted, and trying (and failing) to shut the stable door now won't help.

The current battle for digital personal rights is the right to private communication and data storage, and thanks to encryption and open source software, that one's not lost yet.

I too not long ago went through the inheritance gunk with the UK.

> These then need to be 'notarized' by a legal person - with seals and embossed stamps before they can be used to identify me. It's medieval.

My experience of this was they (the insurance/solicitors) were just being obstructionist for fun, because when confronted with the requested notarized documents they kept moving the goalposts around, and only a threat to withdraw business from them on other fronts made them snap out of it.

Crucial point on this though: it isn't going to be mandatory. Swiss ID cards are not mandatory either although in practice not having one can be inconvenient.

Next year Swiss ID cards will come in two variants: biometric if you want to travel around the EU and existing plastic card if you just want to have it for Switzerland.

So you can even go so far as to opt out of biometrics providing you don't intend to travel internationally.

For me the objections in the UK is not really about the principle (although there are always going to be some privacy/liberty/etc. concerns in that sense), but about the likely implementation.

If we could be assured that whatever was put in place was genuinely privacy/security focused, had open and transparent governance, and wasn't susceptible to capture by corporations/other powerful actors, I suspect many people wouldn't be too bothered. But that's not really the offer, it never is with public IT infrastructure in the UK. The likelihood is that it would be farmed out to one more private corporations to build and maintain, generally for a lowest bid, and overseen by people without sufficient expertise to avert many/any of the potential harms from a poor implementation.

There are good ways to do things like this: public ownership, open governance, security/privacy baked in, all based on a reflective national conversation about trade-offs and the valid fears that many have. What people don't trust is not really the concept of ID cards, it is instead the track record of this and previous governments with both IT and privacy impacting legislation, and even more so the potential inclinations of future governments, particularly at a time when far-right parties are floating ideas like mass deportation of people legally entitled to be here.

Digital ID and a free society are not inherently opposed, but there is no sign that this or other administrations are sufficiently interested in, or aware of, the complexities involved to produce anything other than a semi-permanent disaster.