The announcement of a new digital ID that will be mandatory for employment is raising major privacy concerns in the UK, even as the nation grapples with mass unrest about the illegal immigration the scheme was designed to reduce.
The proposed new “BritCard” would most likely be stored on smartphones, and employers would be required to verify that employees have it and are legal to work in the country. The full details of the digital ID scheme have yet to be developed and the actual rollout might still be years away, but early privacy concerns raised by opposition forces include the prospect of hacking and “scope creep” to areas such as health care and police stops.
Britain’s digital ID plan already meeting with serious political, privacy and national identity objections
The digital ID plan was primarily introduced as part of the Labour Party government’s program to curb illegal immigration, which has become a hot-button issue in the country as of late. Surveys have shown Britons do now generally support the idea of a national ID, something has been tried and failed in the past due to similar privacy concerns, but they would prefer it to be a physical card that blends the functions of the current common photo IDs (such as driver’s licenses and passports) rather than a digital ID. The old privacy concerns seem to still be in place when it comes to the idea of sensitive identity data being centralized and stored and accessible by phone, an attitude that is hardly unwarranted given recent cybersecurity issues across the nation.
The Conservative Party, which was part of the coalition that put an end to the prior national ID plan in 2006, has stated that it would be opposed to the digital ID plan so long as it is mandatory for all Britons but would be open to a “national debate” about other means of implementing it. The Reform Party, the most anti-immigration of the major parties, also declared against BritCard on the basis of cybersecurity concerns and suspicions of government overreach.
That creates an unusual situation in which parties usually most in favor of loosening immigration restrictions are pushing the BritCard for work and residency, while those that generally oppose migration are calling for the plan to be scrapped. The digital ID is also a break from previous Labour platform positioning on the subject. The move may be seen as a necessary tactical withdrawal from the position in the face of over a year now of pitched protests and riots over government spending on migrants and sexual assaults allegedly linked to them, which is thought to be the primary driver of the Reform Party’s historical surge in the polls and recent strong performances in local elections.
Privacy concerns include possibility of use of digital ID for rentals
There are very few fine details about the digital ID plan as of yet, with likely months (if not years) of political debate ahead before the BritCard system takes a concrete form. But one of the big early privacy concerns is the mention of BritCard also being used to verify legal residency status when renting a domicile, something aimed at cracking down on large amounts of visa overstayers; a recent Labour Party study found that likely about half of asylum seekers who had claims denied in the past 14 years remained in the country after being ordered to leave.
The digital ID is also likely to be an expansion of the existing “One Login” system, which already allows UK residents to access dozens of government services via web browser or app. Critics with privacy concerns point to that as a worrying element, fearing “scope creep” that sees the app gradually become mandatory to prove identity for a wide variety of everyday activities.
Supporters of the idea point to two other nations that serve as examples: France, whose government has declared that lack of national ID is a “pull factor” contributing to its own migrant crisis, and Estonia, which saw illegal immigration drop after it began rolling out a national digital ID in 2018. They also note that the polls in which Britons support the idea of a more “offline” national ID find that they do want it to be tied to the sorts of services that One Login already supports, such as reporting street maintenance issues to public works.
One other source of resistance comes from the parts of the UK outside of England, and does not tie to privacy concerns. Other nations are worried that the national digital ID will mean declaring a British identity, something that some are vehemently opposed to. All of the major parties of Northern Ireland, where residents have the option to declare as either British or Irish or both, have issued statements rejecting the digital ID plan. The UK government responded to this by assuring Ireland that any BritCard system would respect the Good Friday Agreement.
