We tracked like 17 million train arrivals last year to see where delays happen, and this is the result 🗺️

Find out the best and worst stations, routes and times of day in our 2025 Wrapped overview: https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

(on that note, we have a new website so check that out too)

Having watched another round of the British NO2ID debate, which has opposed the introduction of a single national ID document since 2004, I cannot help but notice a rather drastic misconception of the problem, including among many IT professionals.

The debate is presented as a binary choice between 'no id = high privacy today' and 'id tomorrow = less privacy', but the reality is exactly the opposite. In reality, every person in the UK who opens a bank account, rents an apartment, buys a house, takes a mortgage, gets employed - and does one of thousands of other tasks that are required by modern life by anyone older than 15 - voluntarily surrenders their privacy at a scale that is hundreds of times greater than the 'privacy concerns' associated with a national ID card. Let's look at the details.

First, take a look at the list of 'documents approved for voting in the UK', which includes 21 different types of document. However, only some variants of some documents are approved, such as the Oyster 60+ card, while others, such as the standard Oyster card, are not.

This long and confusing list only exists because of absence of a single physical national ID document, something that has been in place in the EU for decades. In most EU countries, the plastic ID card is the only document that anyone, including government and commercial entities, can request from you as identification (passports, just like in the UK, aren't mandatory in most countries). There's no confusion if you can use Oyster or Oyster 60+ as "photo id" simply because nobody uses bus cards as photo id when you have a single, standardised national id card.

Then take a look at the list of 'Acceptable proof of address documents', which contains 10 types of document that are required by government and commercial entities whenever they need to confirm someone's address in addition to the identity. Most of of these documents contain highly sensitive information, such as mortgage statements. In the UK, you have to provide these to banks, employment agencies, rental agencies, property agencies, and dozens of other companies, usually with three months of history, making it a hefty pile of printouts left at various more or less professional offices. Over your lifetime an average British resident leaves these countless piles of sensitive documents at hundreds of locations and you can only hope they actually do care that they are securely disposed of at some point.

Of course, institutions need to verify your identity, but they can't do so unambiguouslu because there's no single nationalID, so they resort to this kind of improvised, risk-based method based on assumption that "one can't counterfeit three utility bills". They then keep your sensitive documents God knows where and for how long. Because, you know, 'it must be a paper copy'.

TechDirt, for example, published a scathing critique of the national ID system, employing the familiar "surveillance and privacy" scare tactic.

Digital ID systems expand the number of entities that can access personal information, and consequently use it to track and surveil.

In the context of the massive privacy violations that are currently codified in British law and business practices due to the lack of a national ID, the term 'track and surveil' is a complete reversal of the truth here.

In my opinion, the only reason national ID has been opposed for decades is because of lobbying by private companies that process these massive financial data troves for profit by selling 'identity verification' services to the government and then selling your own aggregated data to you in the form of 'credit scores', etc.

Ironically, the question about commercial use of this aggregated personal data has been asked... to the government Digital Id explainer:

Will you sell my data? No. User control is at the heart of our proposals. The government will only provide third parties with access to your personal data when you instigate this sharing or it is otherwise permitted under UK data protection laws.

It doesn't seem to be asked to any of the private companies that for years had been aggregating personal data for profit.

A single national Id documents had been in operations in all EU for the last few decades, including digital Id for the last decade. From personal experience, both national id and digital id actually preserve privacy by making it the single document that a government or commercial entity needs to be seeing.

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