The Telegraph reports today that the Coalition Government has been building has been building a new identity system in the wake of the end of ID cards last year.The new system is due to be beta tested in October and it is intended to identify users of government websites. Details have yet to be announced so precisely how this system will work is still to be determined.
Our friends at NO2ID have been notified of the new system. NO2ID General Secretary Guy Herbert said,“the devil will be in the details and especially the legal details …. and, “It’s not a bad thing in itself to check that the person you are talking to is the person you want to talk to. But whatever the good intentions at the outset, the fear will always be that the bureaucratic imperative to collect and share more data about the public will take over.”
From the little information that we have so far, it seems that this system isn’t so much an ID system, but a single sign-on system for government websites.That means that users can be identified through one or several different means – like a credit card or council tax details – and they can create a unified account in order to do a number of different activities online. Paying tax, renewing a driver licence, or updating a home address is just one of many things that may be able to be accomplished with the rollout of a new government websites. We hope, however, that this scheme allows for us all to opt-in and not be opted-in by the government itself.
Face it - they are going to bring this back again and again each time slightly changed, until they get it through. THEN they scope-creep it up a bit .....
Posted by: Purlieu | 23/05/2011 at 05:40 PM
I thought we'd killed ID cards?
It's a bit like a hydra. Every time you cut off one head it grows another two.
Come on Cameron. Leave it out!
Posted by: John Galt | 23/05/2011 at 07:15 PM
Paying tax, renewing a driver licence, or updating a home address is just one of many things that may be able to be accomplished with the cheap runescape gold(http://www.gamegoldfast.com/runescape/buy-runescape-gold.php) of a new government websites.
Posted by: Wu Ting | 30/05/2011 at 07:47 AM
Good stuff as per usual, thanks. I do hope this kind of thing gets more exposure.
Posted by: MBT Shoes | 04/07/2011 at 08:13 AM