So, we’re about to introduce a compulsory ID card system that will require the development and maintenance of a comprehensive dataset of all UK citizens and residents. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a valuable commodity, that information – and as Ross Clark pointed out in The Spectator, “no one can assume that our information will never at any point be sold to private interests. That is, after all, exactly what already happens with the electoral roll, at least the public-facing side of it”. More to the point, we are just seeing the aftershocks of a whole series of hacking episodes – in some cases by clever teenagers – of big companies, including Jaguar Land Rover, M&S, the Co-op, all of them acutely embarrassing and very, very costly. Today we learned about the hack of a group of nursery schools which meant that the pictures and personal details of a number of tots are out there on the dark web. So, precisely what guarantees are there that the much larger and more complex database required for a national ID scheme would be proof against the same ingenious and unscrupulous agents?
