chattykathy
An ID card would be immensely useful for my elderly mum who no longer has a driving licence or passport. She also lives in a care home so doesn't have utility bills. It took a lot of messing about to renew her Blue Badge last year. I'll also be having one and can't understand people's resistance to it.
I'm all for those who want to have an ID card will be able to have one.
However, maybe use a little imagination to understand why we don't share your optimism around them. 3,000,000 of us, I and the rest of my family signed the petition showing our opposition for making them mandatory for a multitude of reasons, some outlined below.
Mass state surveillance of our daily activities. Please anyone don't come out with the old chestnut of "if you have nothing to hide" we have no idea how that could pan out given the grey areas we already have around free speech and what could manifest in the future with another government.
The potential for our data to render us vulnerable to aggressive foreign states and God knows there are enough of those these days.
The idea that basic rights could be denied, to work, to have a bank account, accessing health services, if one is deemed to hold views on what the government of day considers to be subversive.
Maybe consider the worst case scenario of China in that respect.
Centralised data of all our personalised information would be a prime target for hackers. Estonia was used as a blueprint for potentially rolling them out here. They, have suffered significant problems along those lines.
Concerns over government overreach, particularly with regard to what could come down the line in that respect. We all know how falsified data was used against the sub Post Office employees.
Massive lack of trust in the government, or any government's ability to protect digital ID Data.