Britain to Introduce Compulsory Digital Id for Workers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3H_peKI6R0

https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/assets/EN-05-10553.pdf

After the UK implements this, other western countries will follow. For example, here in Australia, it's a simple solution to the under-16 social media ban which is about to come into effect. The bill was given deliberately weak verification requirements so it didn't seem too big-brother, but I'd bet real money that there's already an amendment in the works to tie it to digital ID after they discover what everyone already knows (i.e. that it'll be easily bypassed), followed by another amendment to tie the digital ID to site/app ID, for online safety reasons of course.

In time, websites/apps may offer your government's digital ID as an alternative to their in-house identity provider. If this becomes globally ubiquitous, many of them will stop maintaining their own authentication and rely solely on government ID providers. The identity provider you use will depend on where you are, so VPNs will become useless.

This was all inevitable from the day the internet opened up to everyone. Governments have an insatiable desire for power and limitless paranoia about threats to their power.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...

Yeah, not really online posts though is it.

At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.

And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.

So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.

Well, maybe the app will keep working and you can update it from Aurora Store. Pretty vague so far.

I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.

About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"

Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.

I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.

Most of EU and many other countries have something like that, at least you have a citizenship or resident number that they can check against to see what's your situation.

In UK though, everything is run over proof of address and it's quite annoying for new immigrants(legal or not) because its circular. You can't have anything that can be used as proof of address without having proof of address already. At some point you manage to break circle by first having something that doesn't require proof of address but it is serious enough to be accepted as one, i.e. I know people who were riding the tube without tapping in so that when they are caught the government will send them a letter about their fine and they can use the letter to open a bank account.

The Turkish version is both great, annoying and terrible.Great because you can do all your government stuff and some other stuff like see your full medical history, make an appointment etc or managing your service subscription(water, electricity, cable. GSM etc) from the government portal. Annoying because whatever you buy beyond groceries now they are asking for your ID number and all purchases are becoming a chore. Terrible because these systems are regularly hacked and all your private data is online for sale and some even run an API to access your govt stuff live.

It works fine to manage legal immigration, you give the immigrants the ID so the can have their subscriptions etc. Once they are no longer wanted you know where to find them and make providers cut them off. It doesn't work for illegal immigrants because since they can't register to anything they end up just asking a friend to start them a subscription or pay extra to have some employee start them a subscription that in the records look like its for the employee.

It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.

Proper border checks prevent illegal immigration.

The digital ids are introduced for other reasons - this is something Tony Blair has been pushing for a long time.

Yes. The rules are complex, and currently the government essentially deputizes employers and banks to enforce them; anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.

I hate the UK surveillance state as much as anyone, but one-stop ID verification managed by the government is honestly less bad than the current patchwork. The banks are already "voluntarily" sharing everyone's identity information with the government, without any of the legal checks and balances that would apply to an official system.

> If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.

Stop vagueposting. If you have something to say, say it.

No idea how that would solve anything illegal though and realistically, I don't think they do either.

If your new hire is a British or Irish citizen, you ask for their passport on their first day and retain a photo/scan. In most cases this means that a layperson has to verify that the (possibly foreign) document is genuine, but I don’t think fake passports are a statistically meaningful problem.

If they have a visa or, probably most likely in recent years, EU right to remain, they will have a share code for online verification. That takes you to a page with their details and a passport-style photo that you can download as PDF for your records.

Identifying whether someone has the right to work has never been a problem. If somebody is working illegally, it’s because the employer is either knowingly employing them illegally, or doesn’t care/bother to check (or even know that they’re legally required to do so – a perennial problem with early stage startups in London, in my experience).

You know, coincidentally.

(Oh, hold on I guess it helps with immigration numbers because people won’t want to put up with this bullshit.)

It doesn't. The kind of employer who would employ an illegal immigrant is certainly not going to ask to see ID of any kind. They would surely be especially wary of any electronic ID because that would make it easier to associate them with the immigrant. ID cards are only of any use to legal workers and honest employers.

If the UK wants the benefits of a solid ID it should look to Scandinavia. In Norway everyone has a unique number in the population register and this ID is your user ID for all state services. Employers can ask for this number and look you up. Of course it still doesn't prevent people working on the black for cash in hand but neither will an ID card or ID app.

There is no appetite for ID cards in Norway either, yet successive governments keep pushing the idea despite there being no compelling reason to believe that any problems will be solved by them.

It does not. That is not what this is for. It is just how they are selling it to the public. Just like with age verification for porn sites to supposedly protect the children or how they limit your cache and financial transactions to supposedly fight money laundering and financing terrorism(what a joke).

It's all about monitoring and controlling citizens offline and online to gain full control over their lives. Yes, it sounds Orwellian and no, it is not a joke.

Digital wallets and money comes next. This way the government will be able to actually control your behavior.

Why do they do that? Why not. It makes their lives easier as they do not have to be accountable to the people that voted for these public servants to manage the country and instead can push unpopular agendas by their puppeteers whom have private agendas of their own that usually, essentially always, goes against the well being of the population and nation itself.

Politics has not changed since we first discovered fire. This is nothing new. We just have better technology.

In lots of countries you need a specific right to work, and people who are on holiday visas or who are making asylum applications, or have simply entered the country without the right to do so, are not allowed to work.

Some consider these restrictions themselves to be a problem.

Currently, employers in the UK are legally required to check the right-to-work status of people they employ. This is usually done with a random assortment of ID documents and visa status checks. The proposal (I think) is to replace this and other functions with "Britcard", a digital ID system.

So another problem might be that government security schemes are usually pretty bad.

And a further one could be that there's little to stop (say) an asylum applicant from 'borrowing' someone else's britcard-enabled phone to sign on and work Uber Eats illegally, which is one of the issues that they are allegedly trying to tackle.

Beyond that ... sure there's massive privacy implications etc etc.

So yeah, which problem did you have in mind?

Remember that the "problem" is that it can be used as a political tool by outside parties like Reform. It helps this problem by allowing the Prime Minister and others to appear on TV pointing to strong measures they're implementing. The efficacy of the measures is beyond the attention span of someone watching the headlines.