@fencoul I voted "no" because I remember the ghastly mess that was the National Identity Register proposed by the Home Office under Tony Blair (about the ONLY good thing David Cameron did on gaining office was to kill it with fire). And I also remember my father (born in 1924) telling stories of how the wartime mandatory ID card was misused by the police/authorities to harass people, leading to an earlier civil rights campaign (in the 1950s).
Strong ID is inevitable, so we, the people, need to get ahead of this.
We need a Digital ID Bill of Rights:
Untrackability: verify identity while getting very little to track someone on.
Qualified anonymity: criminals can be unmasked; you can ban an offensive person entirely but they keep anonymity.
Erasability: a completely restart must be possible.
The first and third can be done with strong crypto; the second needs a trusted central authority that keeps secrets.
@TomSwirly @fencoul "We need a Digital ID Bill of Rights"
—Good luck getting that under the Tories (hint: the project would be overseen by the Home Office, so we're looking at the most depraved authoritarian bigot they can find, currently Suleia Braverman).
And good luck hoping for it under Labour led by Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions who is an instinctive authoritarian and went mediaeval on anyone the police collared in 2011 after the riots.
Fen C
Charlie Stross
Tom Ritchford