Risk factor: Digital ID threatens our privacy

“For too many years it’s been too easy for people to come here, slip into the shadow economy and remain here illegally, because frankly we’ve been squeamish about saying things that are clearly true.” 

That was what Keir Starmer said about the UK’s approach to tackling people working illegally in the UK over the last decade. He continued: “We need to know who’s in our country.” And to be fair, there’s little arguing with that.  

But Starmer’s solution to that, digital ID, is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And for so many reasons. An obvious risk, as leading cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward has said, is it creates “an enormous hacking target”.  

Woodward says that if the data is held on a vast database to allow for cross-referencing, “it’s painting a huge target on something to say, ‘come and hack me’”. 

We are aware that the threat already exists. Last month, Jaguar Land Rover was hit with a major cyber-attack, which halted operations for weeks and, at the time of writing, is still ongoing. And Estonia, the country often lauded as a world leader for digital transformation, has reportedly previously had data criminally exfiltrated from its government ID system. 

While there is not a lot of detail known about what digital ID will look like in the UK, we do know that it will be mandatory for every person working in the UK, and will include citizens’ photos, names, dates of birth, nationalities, and residency status.  

Even if that is the extent of it, I’m not comfortable with that information about me becoming a target for hackers, who have become increasingly sophisticated in extracting the information they want. 

Aside from potential foreign hackers, there is the fear from within that this is the peeling away of yet another layer of privacy for UK citizens. It was a big concern of many Brits the last time the Labour government under Tony Blair touted national ID cards. 

The idea of giving the government sweeping access to sensitive data about yourself clearly opens the door to the potential for a future government to infringe on your privacy and fundamental freedoms. It won’t be an overnight, it will be gradual, a layer-by-layer peeling away of your privacy.  

And the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change suggested in a report published two days before Starmer’s announcement that IDs could have a function where a user reports an issue, such as noise, vandalism, or road damage. While I don’t see a huge issue with this at a basic level, as many citizens already report these issues in other ways, the TBI is suggesting these reports could be tallied in a “community impact” score.

I also ask: how will this new data interact with AI systems that the government will establish in the future?  

These are pertinent concerns that cannot be brushed off.  

In some ways, it has shades of the USA Patriot Act, passed just six weeks after 9/11. A law justified under the guise of protecting citizens, in a similar vein to tackling immigration here in the UK. Aside from the expansion of surveillance of communications, which it appears will not be affected at least with the immediate implementation of mandatory digital IDs, it permitted a mass collection of metadata regardless of if you were thought to have committed a crime, similar to how digital IDs could.  

I believe, particularly as a journalist, privacy is sacrosanct. It has been drilled into me that without that right, many would not be able to do the job they do.  

BBC Scotland recently went undercover working in a Scottish care home, uncovering shocking malpractice and mistreatment of residents. Would that be possible with digital ID? Probably not. And how many more years would Winterbourne View have been operating if it weren’t for secret BBC Panorama filming? Digital ID would clearly make this much harder, maybe impossible. 

As our politics becomes more polarised, little unites the left and right, but mandatory digital ID has. The SNP, Sinn Fein, the Lib Dems, the Conservatives, and Reform UK all oppose it.  

Tory backbencher David Davis and First Minister John Swinney have both raised concerns around people being able to go about their lives “without such infringements”. 

Davis argues: “The plan will effectively centralise the management of all the data that the government keeps on you – from medical history to tax accounts, from welfare eligibility to passport records – and in so doing, give the government sweeping access to vast amounts of sensitive data for digital IDs.” 

This is clearly a feeling shared by the British people, whose support for digital ID, according to More in Common, fell from 35 per cent to –14 per cent the weekend after Starmer made the announcement.  

For many reasons, this is a policy to be worried about, and it’s also worth mentioning that the Scottish Government has been developing its own digital ID, although not mandatory. Both should be treated with scepticism and should not be blindly accepted.  

The prime minister says we’ve been squeamish about “saying things that are clearly true” in relation to illegal immigration. I say we cannot be squeamish in challenging the potential attack on our privacy and civil liberty that digital ID threatens.