Identity Cards rant
I’ve been meaning to blog about ID cards for quite a while. But this Guardian article http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1817436,00.html says everything that I want to about the subject.
 Please read it, even if you aren’t normally interested in politics. It really matters and you need to decide whether you are  willing for this to happen in our country or not.
Gareth Said,
July 15, 2006 @ 9:46 am
There is a very interestingly dynamic relationship between civil liberties and (strangely) civil liberties.
It’s almost a contradiction: our civil liberties need to be protected in a manner that doesn’t simultaneously protect the civil liberties of someone else who is going to abuse them in order to attack our way of life. It’s almost as if the very thing that we treasure the most is our Achilles’ Heel.
The very type of monitoring that the Guardian journalist decries in this article (assuming that it was fully established in the exact manner described by the journalist) would have alerted the authorities to the activities of Muhammad Atta - who led the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. But clearly that is not what he is worried about; he is worried about its potential for abuse. But a government identity card scheme is probably less vulnerable to that than, say, your Tesco clubcard.
Read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/bigbrother/privacy/yourlife/story/0,,785834,00.html
Just like “the neighbour” in that article, when we moved house and found that Tesco was more convenient than Sainsbury’s, we were sent hundred’s of pounds worth of money off vouchers by Sainsbury’s when they realised that we had stopped using their loyalty card.
Tesco’s loyalty card system and in-store security technology doesn’t just mean that they know my eating and drinking habits, that I have a small dog and at least one cat and read Private Eye & The Times. They also know my car registration numbers, what town I work in, what I look like (they take pictures at petrol pumps of car and driver before the pump is activated) and what I buy at the pharmacy.
And this information is theoretically -and legally- for sale, via a broker, to anyone who wants to buy it.
Busyknitter Said,
July 15, 2006 @ 10:33 am
Well, exactly. And that’s why I don’t belong to any loyalty card schemes.
Hubby takes things a stage further. He avoids using his debit card as much as possible, simply carries sufficient cash to pay for day to day purchases.
Will post more later, but have to dash right now.
Busyknitter Said,
July 16, 2006 @ 1:14 am
I’ve been thinking about this during the day. Yes, many of our activities and routine transactions are already being logged and recorded. But the data is disparate and mostly held for commercial reasons. The National Identity Register will belong to the Government, will hold everything in one place and the purpose of the register will be control.
And this is a Government that seems to be driven to control and to label and micro-manage the lives of its subjects. For goodness sake, they even want to establish a national register of “gifted children”.
If Amazon’s database of my book purchases gets corrupted, the worse that can happen is that they try and sell me books I’m not interested in. And if I don’t like the idea of a company tracking and recording what books I buy, I can always take myself off to town and buy them with good old-fashioned cash. But if errors get into my NIR file or even worse, if my electronic identity is stolen I might end up being arrested.