I wouldn't put it passed them to require the digital ID to access the internet passed curfew.
One person I believe knows this, is Keir Starmer. It's very hard to explain why things happen in UK politics without assuming he is trying to tank Labour.
How is someone supposed to benefit from a thing whose only function is to reduce the friction against forcing them to correlate their otherwise-independent activity against their will?
To caveate this, I am a Labour member (with the goal of advising tech policy such that they don't send our tech industry off a sharp cliff). I've spoken to a few in the cabinet now about growth and industrial policy, and there's no appetite for engagement outside of their think-tanks. I go to the conferences today, and in contrast to the Tory government days where the main topic of conversation was "what do people want" and "how do we gain seats in the election", it's now all navel-gazing about how "well" their policies poll (vs how well the party does, as if they're the same thing). It's baffling how out of touch the current power brokers are regarding the danger Labour are in. There's rose-tinted glasses, and then there's obsidian-tinted horse blinders.
It’s what the UK government has shown time and again when they ask for more data: they use it for previously denied-aims to expand their surveillance state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mass_surveillance...
It's not an unreasonable assumption either. Nick Clegg did seemingly get rewarded for tanking the lib Dems. The ones lower in the party hierarchy will also have seen plenty of examples of pyrrhic loyalty being rewarded.
What modern parties effectively teach - UK Labour is just one of many examples, not even the only example in the UK - is that the supreme political virtue is loyalty to decisions taken in rooms you weren't invited to. That, they think, will eventually get them invited to those rooms.
The sad thing is that whether the rooms actually exist or not, the result is much the same.
"Don't obey in advance" is Tim Snyder's first rule against tyranny. While that is a great moral rule to follow in tyrannies, all organizations want people to obey beforehand, whether tyrannies or not. It's called showing initiative, doing what's needed without having to be told explicitly, and no organisation can function without it.
But in organizations with opaque power structures, where it's expected that decisions are taken unaccountably ("Noen har snakket sammen", loosely, "There has been discussion", used to be an ironic phrase in the Norwegian Labour Party), people may easily slip into obeying in advance a tyrant who doesn't even exist. They're trying to please the responsible people who are surely in charge somewhere nebulously above them in the hierarchy, but those people don't exist, it's bullshitters like Starmer all the way to the top.
Snyder's had his first rule, but I have a first rule too, which I keep repeating, and that is that powerful people believe in all the stupid things regular people believe in. They just act differently on the beliefs. A common person who thinks covid was an ethnically targeted bioweapon rants about it online and gets banned from Reddit. A powerful person who believes it, thinks "it's important that we too get such a weapon, and don't trust experts who say it can't be done, they probably just have scruples". A common person who thinks a Jewish cabal rules the world maybe pesters his relatives with it all day. A powerful person who believes it - well, he's more likely to do something like what Starmer has been doing the last decade. You don't try to fight Bilderberg, obviously, you try to get invited to it. Once you do, (like e.g Jens Stoltenberg was) you probably get disappointed and try to figure out who the real competent ones behind them too are, and how to join them - but you're not terribly disappointed, because on the way up you've been rewarded by all the others who thought they'd be rewarded for supporting someone like you.
For governmental services, I use it for things like logging into health care services. Where I've used it for checking my prescriptions, and communicating with my doctor. If I had kids I would have used it for contact with the school. An other governmental use is tax filling and tax returns which comes around every year, and this is just scratching the surface.
When it comes to non governmental usage, it is mostly bank and bank adjacent usage. I do use it to log into my different banks, my stock broker, and insurance providers.
The solution we have in Norway, is not perfect and one of the persistent problems, are that not everyone can get one, and since it is used a lot by the government, not having it, makes you a bit of a second class citizen. I do believe that they are finally doing something about that, and that the system will be redone a bit next year, so even if the banks don't like you. You will be able to get one.
Simpler take: The middle ground has been hollowed out. The old method (appeal to the centre) does not appear to be working. Starmer's throwing stunt policies at the wall to try to get some purchase.
You and the provider may have different ideas about where that line is drawn.
It certainly is. And he'd maybe use more classy words for it, if he ever could be convinced to talk about his sincere beliefs. But as I said, I'm fully convinced that powerful people believe all the out there things that regular people believe. We've seen so many examples of it over the decades, and it's otherwise very hard to explain why Starmer would keep doing things which are neither a popular thing to do or the right thing to do.
The simpler take you propose doesn't work for me, because "throwing things at the wall" suggest unpredictability to me, and Starmer has been very predictable if you assume what I have been assuming for a few years now. His actions are not the actions of someone who would try anything, quite the opposite.
this isn't to say that Keir Starmer is doing an amazing job. he's not. he's far too comfortable with authoritarianism and far too establishmentarian, and I would much rather someone like Andy Burnham in charge--even if you can trust his policy positions just as much as Starmer's from when he won the leadership--just because he has some energy and charisma about him, and you feel like he might be able to counteract Farage somewhat, but, at the same time, the level of scrutiny of Labour is incredibly unfair and before you criticise them yourself, you have to try and remember that you're viewing it all through that filter
And doesn't address many of the other problems (eg accuracy)
When the action is clearly going to hurt their political career, and there's no indication that it will put money in their pockets, and they don't even make much of an attempt to claim they're fighting for a principle, yet they clearly have a purpose in mind and keep doubling-down on it, you have to start looking for a motive somewhere else. "They hate their own people" comes to mind, but that's not really an answer because it still leaves you looking for the reason why they hate their own people. Not all leaders do, after all.
The wallet uses Digital Verification Services (DVS) to poll APIs in front of the data the government already holds on you. These services check details you enter against that data and return cryptographic signatures for each. The wallet puts these together as IDs in a bespoke way, depending on what you need to prove. You can have any number of variations of ID and none of them are centralized.
Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.
Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.
There's a lot of misinformation flying around about this proposal, but the design itself doesn't match the negative characterizations. It's surprisingly good and weighted to the citizen.
Or they just focused on getting into government with very little plan about what to do when there, and with a particularly inexperienced team (few former cabinet ministers in the elected Labour MPs).
That's a password manager or authenticator app. You don't need a government to do anything to have that.
> Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.
People always bring this up as a theory, but most of the ZK systems don't actually do this, e.g. they give you a bitstring that "doesn't identify you" but they know who you are when they give it to you, and you're meant to present it to a third party who could collude with the service who does know who you are to map it back to you.
In other words, the ZK proof is an attempt to bamboozle people with complicated math rather than something that really works.
The only way to actually prevent this is to make the data the user presents to the second service indistinguishable for all users meeting the qualification, i.e. if you're over 18 then you get a secret, everyone over 18 gets the same secret, and then the second service just gets the secret and compares it, and you rotate it with some interval which is at least a week. (You can't rotate it continuously or you get timing attacks; even once a week is giving up a non-trivial amount of entropy because you can narrow down the user to the people who have requested the token in the last week and repeat the process every week that person uses it to keep winnowing it down.)
But the proposals don't ever seem to do that, most of them don't even use ZK proofs or don't use them properly.
> Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.
You can't fix this by making it illegal because you don't have a mechanism to identify when they're doing it. You give them data that could identify you and then whether they use it for that happens behind closed doors.
Then you get all of the chilling effects even if they're not (currently) doing it because with no way for people to corroborate, people have to assume that they are. And on top of that, you've now deployed a system that ties everyone's activity to their identity and then it's just the stroke of a pen before they're doing it openly, or it comes out that they're doing it illegally but nobody does anything to stop it a la Snowden.
Specifically, our system [1] is available as open source [2] and work is underway to implement it in the EU age verification app [3]. I understand that this thread is about the UK and not the EU, and I make no claims about the UK. The system is not theory, but it is already shipping in Google Wallet [4] and in the Open Wallet Foundation multipaz system [5].
[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010
[2] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
[3] https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
[4] https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
If they cared about the country - they don't, they have complete contempt for the public - they would step down, dissolve the party and those in the party with a remaining qubit of morality put their efforts into atoning for their sins and crimes against freedom by working to get a Green/YP/LibDem coalition elected.
Every day they lolligag with this dead party is another vote for Reform - they know this.
The part about only listening to their own think tanks is weird. Academia leans left. American conservatives are suspicious of advice not from their think-tanks, but that’s because it’s hostile territory. The Democrats treat the university/expert/consultant class as free labor.
I don’t mean to be critical of your country especially given who is running America. But we do watch, and it has an impact here. Fear of an American Corbyn is one reason Democrats aren’t veering left.
Also I don’t know if this is related, but the fact that the US is about to install Tony Blair to head Gaza should make you rethink Labour’s capacity for thought.
Too reductive. Password managers and authenticators don't give you any means of passing your official data in an authoritative way.
> The only way to actually prevent this is to make the data the user presents to the second service indistinguishable for all users meeting the qualification
Where ZKPs are used (eg for proof of age over 18) you're describing exactly what the proposal seems to expect.
> You can't fix this by making it illegal because you don't have a mechanism to identify when they're doing it. You give them data that could identify you and then whether they use it for that happens behind closed doors.
The system provides for an auditing service to ensure this doesn't happen without user consent.
One thing I have to ask about the democrats and a fear of Corbynism is shutting down primaries really and effective way to prevent one? Voters aren't stupid and the not being able to freely choose their candidate since Obama isn't going to help.
The desire to pass "official data" from someone outside of the entity you're directly interacting with is the design flaw. Stop having that.
> Where ZKPs are used (eg for proof of age over 18) you're describing exactly what the proposal seems to expect.
I suspect that it isn't, because the only systems that actually work in terms of privacy correspondingly can't provide you with any way to identify someone if they're anonymously providing proof of age to anyone who asks, and then it would only take one person to set up a service to do that for everyone. Whereas if you can catch someone who does that you've just proven that the privacy protections aren't real.
> The system provides for an auditing service to ensure this doesn't happen without user consent.
You're suggesting that someone is going to audit something that happens inside of every private company. That's either going to be a box-checking exercise with zero effectiveness or a massively expensive ordeal that only compounds the problem by expanding access to include a set of government auditors -- or both.
The only way three people can keep a secret is if two of them are dead. If you don't want corporations to have your private information, you can't give it to them and then try to stuff the cat back into the bag. You have to prevent them from having it to begin with.
Laws requiring them to collect it are the opposite of that.
As your closest neighbor I think about how things could have been.