Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

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Let's quote the godfather of British ID cards, Tony Blair:-

> Why is TikTok so successful? Because its algorithms establish your personal preferences so quickly and satisfy them with their content. How do they do that? By accumulating your data and using the services of a huge number of computer engineers to make those algorithms so effective.

[...]

> Imagine that all your health information was in one place: easy, with your permission, for anyone anywhere in the health service to see. That your passport, driving licence, anything you need to prove your identity, were in one simple digital wallet, unique to you. That you could purchase and pay for any goods or services using your digital ID.

https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/to...

So the proposal isn't just a mandatory ID card - it's also the unification of all government databases.

Combining tax records, driving licenses, passports, NHS records, benefits, vehicle registration, the ability to get a job, the ability to rent a house and the ability to get a bank account into one unified super-database (with an app)

The ID being fully digital will also be a boon for the financial services industry. Today banks extending large loans can afford to check people's documents properly even if it takes a few days and a visit to a bank branch. But what payday loan companies that want to loan someone £15 for a takeaway curry on sunday evening? They don't have the margin, the time or the physical presence to check IDs properly, and often lose money to fraud because of it.

I always bring it up in these threads, but as a dual british/swedish citizen I find it incredulous.

Sweden has a national database and a national ID card system, and it makes my life in Sweden a lot better.

That said, I don’t trust the UK government, I haven’t trusted any UK government in my adult lifetime and I am coming into middle-age.

Solve that problem first, maybe?

I am indifferent to having/not having a government ID. But I just find it incredibly stupid for the government to introduce it now given the current political atmosphere.

Have you got a license for that opinion?

(I agree with you)

but now is exactly the time to do it because so many people are mad about immigration and you can blame it on immgrants instead of a thirsty desire to surveil.

Issue is that national ID in the drawer or your pocket, doesn't send your location to government. Digital ID on the phone is just one update away from doing that. Digital ID becomes a fancy name for ankle tag.

The digital authentication system is called BankID, but its effectively tied to the government ID due to the same identifier being used (personnummer).

Again, the issue is mostly trust.

PS: oh dear, oh no, I appear to have offended someone and they’re flagging me, oh dear heavens I must be incorrect then! Woe is me. /s

“Trust” has nothing to do with it. There’s no genuine public need for a government-run digital ID system in the first place. The only people who need it are the corporations who lobbied for it, because it creates new revenue streams by turning identity into a product. Once the whole country is routed through one digital choke-point, everything else follows automatically: behavioural data, movement data, payments data, cross-service profiling. And once that system exists, it only ever moves in one direction.

A paper ID sits in your pocket and minds its own business. A digital ID is one update away from becoming a tracking token. Dress it up however you like, but it’s just an ankle tag with better UX. And the UK track record on data leaks, “accidental” sharing, and mission creep is spectacularly awful. The idea that this won’t be exploited is a fairy tale.

If it goes ahead in the flavour BlackRock and WEF types dream about, expect the usual:

- services quietly tied to compliance thresholds

- financial scoring bleeding into civic rights

- automated sanctions and “risk flags”

- real-time behavioural profiles sold as “fraud prevention”

- and every data breach blamed on a junior contractor who “misconfigured a bucket”.

None of this empowers the public. It just hands more leverage to the same institutions already shaping policy from behind the curtain.

As a person who lives across a society where this exists, and has lived in multiple societies without it.

Frankly, you’re wrong.

There’s a benefit to the public.

Let me frame what I mean with a parable (and, its relevant to my point even if it seems totally unrelated, and I’m typing from my phone, so forgive the briefness).

When I dated my (now) ex-girlfriend; she used to make mention of my teeth as a negative thing, that I’d be more handsome it they weren’t crooked etc.

One christmas she purchased for me, an electric toothbrush. A fancy one, she clearly thought a lot about which one to get: but to her surprise I was unhappy.

An electric toothbrush has (mostly) benefits, this one didn’t even need new heads all the time, dentists almost universally agree that an electric toothbrush is a good option. Yet I was unhappy.

Why? because the gift was mired in the backdrop of previous conversations and self conscious issues.

A few years later, and I received an electric toothbrush as a gift again. However, this time the person giving it had never said anything to make me self concious, even better: they had previously planted an electric toothbrush head at their apartment, so I could use their electric toothbrush body when I visited (this was one of the earliest moments in the relationship and was a not-so-subtle invitation to come back).

Now; it’s the same gift. Same benefits. Why was I happy now when I wasn’t before?

The context made a huge difference.

On the one hand the first gift felt like a way of controlling me and a subtle way of putting me down (or, emotionally it felt that way- regardless of if it was well intentioned or not). The other time it was gifted; it was enhancing what we already had.

Context is important, and thats why I say: this shit is pretty good, but I totally buy why you don’t think so.

I don’t trust the UK Government is doing it for our sake either.

The toothbrush analogy still treats this like a question of personal trust. The real problem is that digital ID systems don’t rely on coercion. They rely on pleasure. Huxley saw this coming: people end up liking the structure that controls them, because it rewards compliant behaviour.

That’s the danger here. Not some cartoon dystopia on day one, but a system that trains people to associate state and corporate approval with comfort.

- You behaved correctly, here’s smoother access to services.

- You kept your “risk score” low, enjoy a discount.

- You shared more data, here’s a fast-track queue or a tax perk.

It’s not a boot on the neck. It’s a pat on the head.

And the public will flock to it, because it’s painless and convenient. Until it isn’t. These systems don’t reset when the government changes. They persist. The next administration can inherit a ready-made apparatus for mass categorisation, movement tracking, sanctions and exclusion. A list of “people who said X, lived at Y, travelled to Z” becomes a single query.

That’s why the UK context matters. The British state already leaks data, already sells access, already outsources core functions to corporations with zero accountability. Give them a unified identity spine and they won’t need to push you into a dystopia. People will march into it smiling, because it’ll start with freebies and frictionless services.

The risk isn’t today’s government. It’s the one after, or the one after that, inheriting a machine built for total visibility. That’s the part everyone pretending this is just “a matter of trust” refuses to acknowledge.

All I asked for was an open mind since the idea seems to work for, what I would consider, superior countries. I don’t particularly mind if you personally want to keep my homeland in the dark ages.

Germany is much the same, and I would never want to live there for this reason.

a crazy disconnected bureaucracy that forces me to prove myself multiple times over with massive cracks to slip through will always be inferior to a well invested cohesive system.

But, look who I’m talking about. When has the UK invested in any good social or physical infrastructure in the last 50 years? ha. Crabs in a bucket.

> Sweden has a national database and a national ID card system, and it makes my life in Sweden a lot better.

Can you be a bit more specific about how?

The amount of paperwork in my life is effectively zero. Even filing taxes can be sending an SMS saying I agree to what they’ve said.

Signing up for a new bank? No problem, the same ID is used for both banks so my authentication of one is good enough to action the transfer.

Benefits (Rot/Rut- for home improvements) are handled without me doing anything.

All my receipts/payslips etc; go to a digital mailbox and I can download them and print them no problem.

Its a lot like how the NHS works w.r.t. prescriptions: except for quite literally everything.

Of all the issues in my life, paperwork has never been one of them. Yes, at certain times – couple hours a year (0.02% of a year) – it's a bit of a faff dealing with paperwork.

House prices, cost of living, lack of healthcare, my family, my health, the economy, transport, the job market etc consume 99.9% of my day-to-day general concerns.

Did people prior to the 2000s have mental breakdowns over paperwork??

How many times do you open a bank account a year??

1) Your argument is: "improving anything that doesn't effect me very much is not worth it."

I mean, there are larger things to fix, but this one is probably larger than you think, even if it's not helping you very much, it'll help crack down on illegal workers (hey, we don't like that, right?) and it'll make the social systems have much less friction.

2) Notice that outside of Stockholm, Swedish house prices are not pegged to infinite like the UK is? I'm not saying that it's because of a central ID system, but you seem to imply that it precludes reasonable house prices... which is weird.

3) The economy is better when it's more efficient. Plenty of people argue inefficiency for the sake of jobs (people pushing paperwork have jobs! cushy government jobs! without them having jobs there'll be more unemployed people! -- I see this a lot more with Americans, and I find it to be an uncompelling argument usually).

--

That is to say, I'm actually on your side, I don't trust the UK government, I'm merely offering a contra-point because in other EU countries these things are actually great and simplify a lot of things that you only really notice when you live with it - thus a lot of the hypotheticals fall on deaf ears to me.

It's like watching people argue that having legs won't improve your life because someone can take away your shoes.

> it'll help crack down on illegal workers

Will it, though?

Businesses already have to get a photocopy of your passport when they hire you, and check your right to work in the country.

If they're not performing the checks, what's the point of a second document they also won't check? Surely the solution is firmer enforcement of the existing law?

Thats not true, I didn’t even have a passport (and I still don’t have a drivers license) for many of the jobs I had in the UK.

UK society does not demand that you have a passport per-se, but there’s very few functional photo ID documents available outside of a drivers license or passport- and getting by without those is annoying but totally possible.

I used to “prove” myself with bills addressed to me, and having a bank account- since, again, neither passport nor drivers license.

Now, getting the bank account was difficult, required a guarantor. But jobs themselves had no requirement, and I could give them someone else’s bank account details I guess.

Same is true of the national security number, which is probably what you meant that the employer must get; that “string” informs the government when you pay tax and therefore you need to be able to work to have one- except there’s no way of proving you’ve supplied the right one: the NI card even says on it that the card itself is not proof of ID.

I note you declined to answer "Will it, though?" and just explained that a passport isn't a hard requirement for Right to Work checks.

I thought it was obvious that it does.

As mentioned, my experience across multiple societies has proven as such.

Unless you live somewhere with a centralised ID system that somehow makes it harder? I doubt it somehow.

> 1) Your argument is: "improving anything that doesn't effect me very much is not worth it."

That's not my argument, and calling me self-centered isn't a very mature reply.

I'm countering the strawman that people are buried in paperwork day-in, day-out (your first reply to 'what makes my life your life better' was 'The amount of paperwork in my life is effectively zero') and the very heavy suggestion that "digital ID" would save us from all that paperwork (edit: though I admit perhaps I'm tilting at windmills a tiny bit in this thread)

> but you seem to imply that it precludes reasonable house prices... which is weird

Not at all what I meant. I was suggesting that paperwork doesn't even register in the very long list of things I care about

Later

> it'll help crack down on illegal workers

How? What evidence?

I don’t want to call you out for this because it will make you quite defensive, so take it in the spirit that its intended: you seem irrational on this point. Perhaps theres an emotional element, because you’re frustrating me quite a lot.

The UK would be far from the first country in the world to have an ID system; we don’t need to deal in hypotheticals. I am extremely sympathetic to the idea that the UK government might abuse the system, but I need to be very fucking clear right now: just because its difficult to tell you how much easier its made my life does not diminish it.

Given you likely wouldnt be able to live in Sweden since Brexit; you’re unfortunately going to have to take my word for it. But it absolutely does help tackle illegal workers.

Without a personnummer you cannot get access to social services; people try to get around it but it is very difficult.

Here is the UK talking about it, and how it works: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/146988/pdf/

Here is a study into how people attempt (and fail) to bypass a centralised system. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/handle/2077/28504/gupea_207...

You're just frustrated I called out your main justification for Digital ID as BS.

Sorry you didn't make a stronger argument. It's one I've read a 100 times: 'we have it where I'm from, it's all I know, therefore it must be good'. Perhaps the UK should adopt Swedish as the official language too (given everything in northern EU is superior)

If you want to make an argument about tackling fraud etc, start with data about the scale of the existing problem, then present some research into exactly how much fraud, quantitively, will be reduced.

I'm not actually against things that would actually tackle fraud/visa overstaying etc – I just want solid evidence ethat multi-billion pound schemes that will reduce privacy will address a specific, known problem.

By the way, plenty of country have more digital systems and still have fraud and illegal workers. That completely destroys any such weak justification.

    Did people prior to the 2000s have mental breakdowns over paperwork??

You might have heard of Franz Kafka?

Hah that made me chuckle!

What would you say Sweden is doing differently than other places in terms of garnering trust with the population? You must have insights if you trust one government and not another

I think it's a bit more democratic, though many in Sweden would prefer it to be more-so. (the major parties used to just sort of agree on 95%+ of issues, leading to some disenfranchisement across the population).

I think though it's a lot about the fact that the UK is sort-of an "adversarial" kind of democracy, and Sweden is more like a "consensus" driven democracy..

The UK is also pretty often plagued by sleaze scandals for officials in public office, by contrast Swedish politicians can be incompetent or fuck-up, but there's much more public access to what they're doing.

I think it's also true that people feel that public services are pretty good, even if the healthcare system is overburdened, and that there could be more police officers: taxes are high but most people definitely think that it's worth it.

The way COVID was handled and the ongoing freedom of speech issues in the UK are also something that make me not trust the government, they'll violate my rights on a whim. Compared to Sweden where even during COVID they didn't lock down (even if it was arguably the right thing to do and would have saved a lot of lives) because it would have violated peoples rights.

I'm not going to sit here and claim that Sweden is a paragon of virtue, they get a lot wrong and there are plenty of inefficiencies, but compared to the UK it's pretty stark.

It's like comparing trust in government between the UK and Russia. (I think that's actually a pretty fair comparison, USA and UK have comparatively similar trust in government compared to Sweden vs UK).

The wast majority of deaths during covid in Sweden occurred not because of lock down differences to other countries, but because of how elder care system. I recall some doctor even described themselves as bringers of death because of how much the system did not work. The post analysis of covid also brings this up as the reason why the numbers didn't end up as good as they had hoped, and when the lock down of elder care facilities did arrive it was both too late and too draconian, including news articles of elders "escaping" through windows.

It was found that having a new person almost every day spending about 15 minutes at some elderly person home before going to the next person, without enough time to even wash their hands, had bad results during an pandemic. They also found out that having a very small number of doctors going from elder care facility to the next in order to sign off on all medicine was also a bad idea.

As a Finnish citizen living in the UK, I also come from a culture where a national ID system exists. I would not trust the UK to do theirs sensibly.

Even the invoked name "Digital ID" makes it very clear that this system would rely on central databases. Only. In a country where the upcoming political parties are actively proposing stripping foreigners from their immigration status, it's pretty clear that all the parties learned at least one common message from the Windrush scandal: destroying documentation of immigrants was not the problem - leaving behind evidence of such action having happened was.

EDIT: the Finnish system at least sets up _some_ guard rails around how the data is used, and mandates a physical document that one can use as a proof when (not if) the central DB is down or going through Windrush 2.0 purge.

Do you trust the Swedish government? I'd assume that's the big difference. British politicians are liars and totally deceitful, out to line their own pockets with government function. See all the issues with PPP during COVID going to Tory MPs who had their hands in the tills of companies getting the contracts. The Digital ID will just be another corruption scandal that is a total disaster but make lots of MPs richer.

> Combining tax records, driving licenses, passports, NHS records, benefits, vehicle registration, the ability to get a job, the ability to rent a house and the ability to get a bank account into one unified super-database (with an app)

Incorrect. The workflow is that the citizen submits their data during onboarding. The app submits the data to its associated verification service, which polls the government API and if the check passes, returns a cryptographic signature for each specific datum, which are then used to generate digital IDs for whatever use. There's no 'unified database'.

There doesn't seem to be support for long text formats either. So on NHS records, while your status as a diabetic for instance might be there as an attribute/signature pair, yuor medical commentary wouldn't be. Perhaps that will change later, but long text doesn't appear to be in scope yet.

Cryptographic signature may as well be a foreign key. It's a super database. Just admit it. You aren't fooling anyone with extra layers of indirection. If it can be interrogated in the manner of a super database, has business requirements in parallel to what a super database would be used for, regardless of minutiae of the implementation, it is, a super database. A rose by any other name...

Perhaps you could describe what you imagine the proposal to be, or how you imagine the process to work?

Are you talking about what will be stored on the phone? That's basically a distraction.

The point is to create a single ID for each person to support a unified super-database. All the chat about smartphones is to make people think that they are in control of the data and how it will be used.

If you are right and that is the point, it isn't described anywhere in the proposal which has been developed over several years. Far from from a "Unified super-database", the government's role is only as reference through an API in front of departmental databases. There's no current proposal to merge them, or assume the role of the verification services who are all third party.

Then, there's no single digital identity. The wallet will hold any number of 'digital identities', each tailored to specific purposes. Each of these identities is a bundle of a subset of the attributes/proofs saved in the app. These identities can be generated on the fly in response to a prompt, but seemingly can be manually created too.

A couple of examples. For a financial application, you might need to show the financial service you're applying to a comprehensive set of data. But to get into a nightclub, you will only need a single Zero-Knowledge Proof confirming you are over 18. These will be two separate IDs. Can you see how this might strengthen citizens by giving them control over what data they show?

Beyond that, there are principles of Purpose Limitation and Minimisation which prevent potential abuse, such as companies demanding information they legally don't need.

You appear to be are under a serious misapprehension about the proposal.

A quote from the government:

> The new digital ID will be the authoritative proof of who someone is

Obviously this will not just be stored on your phone. There will be a backend database of all issued IDs. Which will then serve as an authoritative identity system for unifying government databases.

Restrictions on how companies can use this are nice. I'm more concerned about what the government will do with it.

> Obviously this will not just be stored on your phone. There will be a backend database of all issued IDs. Which will then serve as an authoritative identity system for unifying government databases.

Incorrect, that isn't the proposed system at all. In fact, Government is kept out of the loop, except as a reference. You seem not to understand what the IDs are, so I'll try again to explain their form.

The wallet (the app) holds data that you enter. A datum might be your name or national insurance number, citizenship etc. These are verified individually by the verification service and it returns each one with a cryptographic signature. The 'ID' is then a container for proofs. It exists only on your phone. It's totally disposable. Delete a container and you can regenerate it. And you'll have more than one, many more in fact, for all different uses. Each will have a different selection of attributes and their signatures. The IDs never exist anywhere else other than on your phone. There's no database of IDs, and the app has no contact itself with the government API. Representing it in any other way is a fundamental misunderstanding of the proposal. The proposed format simply doesn't work the way you claim.

If this is true then the original government records are authoritative. The digital ID is not. So the government's claims about its own scheme are false. Is that right?

Both are true, the attribute/proof pairs are guaranteed by those cryptographic proofs. It's better thought of as a way for a citizen to submit their data with authority.

Why do governments think IT projects like this are even possible for them to accomplish? I can guarantee already the requirements of such a system are impossible to capture and then the developers and difficulty to build such a system with probably a thousand or more people working on it for 10 years and billions we can’t currently afford. I predict endless delays, a toxic work environment and the resulting system will not even end up working and will eventually be scrapped probably in favour of smashing everyone’s data into an LLM. Sigh.

Because it has been accomplished already in many countries

A mandatory ID system is not the same as a unified system for all government data which is the suggested real plan

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