Post #1810672

Digital ID in the UK has worked out extremely poorly for eVisas and now they want to roll it out for everyone. This is bad. Do the consultation: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/making-public-services-work-for-you-with-your-digital-identity Why should you be against digital ID? * A charged smart phone with a data plan and a corporate-controlled OS should not be a prerequisite for engaging in society. * People who cannot use a smartphone due to advanced age or disability (this is over 11 million Britons, btw) still have the right to go to the pub for a drink or to buy an adult magazine. Requiring a smartphone for daily life discriminates against elderly people, people with disabilities, people who do not have easy access to charging points, people who do not have money for a phone or a data plan. * Britons should own and control their own identities, pick their own names, and continue to be free to use different names in different contexts. * We should not be surveilled in conducting our everyday life. The government should not have a record of every time we want to buy a bottle of wine or look at pictures of naked people. There is no legitimate government need to know our pron habits. * Sharing biometric data (which must be submitted to get the ID) with police departments erodes our right to just walk around the city without being tracked everywhere. There is no legitimate government interest in mapping all the movements of private citizens who are just going about our day. * The eID system relies on US companies, who have, at the behest of Trump, just cut off people in political work they don't like. What happens when the US government deicides that all trans people, everywhere on earth are invalid? What if they decide to pressure Europe about Greenland and just cut off the entire continent? If we outsource the regular actions of our government to the US, then we are governed partly by them and continually subject to their veto. * Irregular migration is not a "problem" to be "solved", but it's also true that millions of British citizens would be negatively impacted by this. And in places where ID systems like this have been deployed, they have had no measurable impact on migration. This has extreme totalitarian use cases, but none of those impact migration in a meaningful way.