The government is introducing digital IDs that will enable young people to prove their age when buying a pint, but is it worth giving up your privacy to the state to make you life a little easier? Asks James Price
In my favourite movie, 2007’s Hot Fuzz, the village pub allows the underaged children of the village a few alcoholic drinks, all for the greater good and to keep the peace, until Simon Pegg’s by-the-book police officer arrests them all.
Nearly 20 years on from that film, and the days of discretion and blind eyes being turned for the greater good are well and truly over. If such a scene were to happen today, the pub would lose its licence, the barman would go to prison for writing a disobliging Facebook post and some local Nimby’s would complain about all the noise.
Now though, tech-savvy pubgoers may have the opportunity to flash a digital ID card to prove their age instead of having to carry their passport on a night out, as ministers prepare to allow more state services to be offered online through a single service.
Not long before the release of Hot Fuzz, Tony Blair’s administration tried to introduce ID cards. This failed in an absolute torrent of protest. Civil liberties campaigners were up in arms about the infringements to individual freedoms and talk of a police state. I would have been one of them, were I not at home watching the Hot Fuzz director’s commentary DVD on repeat.
Today, though, with public service provision so weak, and with our borders seemingly even weaker, I am tempted by the prospective opportunities digital ID services would bring. I am even more tempted by the defence it would provide against the ever-increasing numbers of illegal immigrants crossing over, jettisoning their paper passports into the English Channel, and slipping into the dark economy.
The Estonian example
Estonia is held up as the shining example of the state delivering services online through a single service. There are over 600 facilities available online, including the signing of official papers, banking, bill-paying and receiving medical records, not to mention voting for their leaders. Better yet, Estonians save on average five days a year not having to wrestle with the hellish bureaucracy that the rest of us face. And businesses, too, link their own services to this central scheme, making the end user experience much more efficient than the morass of passwords and secret answers that bedevil the British online experience.
Setting up a joint bank account recently, I was struck by the fact that I had to bring in a printed utility bill as proof of address. How easy must this be for a determined wrongdoer to fiddle?
Despite the obvious upsides, what’s left of the libertarian firebrand in my soul is screaming at me about the obvious dangers of giving the state this level of control. Debanking was such a pernicious phenomenon, labelling many as ‘politically exposed persons’ and removing services from Nigel Farage and many others. Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist and inventor of the first widely used web browser, recently exposed how crippling to one’s liberties debanking can be, even for Silicon Valley tech founders. Imagine if the State had the power to go further, and essentially ‘unperson’ you?
The reality is that until and unless the enormous administrative state is reigned in, huge amounts of our lives are already controlled by powerful technologies
And then there’s the seeming inability of the British state to achieve anything much at all in recent years. Do we really believe that a blob-led government with Keir Starmer nominally at the top would cherish our ancient liberties and rights to privacy?
The reality is that until and unless the enormous administrative state is reigned in, huge amounts of our lives are already controlled by powerful technologies. Many aspects of our lives already depend on credit scores, CCTV cameras and even employers monitoring our productivity on work devices. And that’s before we realise how much people willingly to disclose about themselves on social media.
There must be a way for us to receive the benefits of this tech revolution, and circumvent the migraine-inducingly acute pain of interacting with the state without suffering the loss of our privacy. But until civil liberties campaigners can demonstrate this, more and more people will find the allure of easy state services, and shutting illegal immigrants out of the system, overpowering. Just like in Hot Fuzz, it’s all for the greater good, right?
James Price is a former government adviser