UK Identity Card 1.0 is in deep trouble. It’s running late, and if the Conservative Party wins next year’s election it’ll be scrapped. Its original architect has changed his mind, and even some Cabinet members are starting to see it as a needless expense. But if we pull the plug, what then?
The cards may go away, but the issue won’t. Problems associated with identity, privacy and security will remain burning issues facing both the technology industry and wider society. But the irony is that the UK is well placed to develop a model identity framework for the 21st Century. Unlike many other countries, we don’t have the problems of any existing, legacy national identity scheme to encumber us. We have a clean slate. We could have got this right and shown the art of the possible.
All the more reason to be dispirited then with the current identity plan, which seems to be rooted in a 1960s view of computing, with everyone’s personal information stored in some monolithic central system and proposed identity cards that seem to be little more than plastic copies of the cardboard identity documents the UK population was forced to use during the second world war.
It is as if someone has dusted off a document for a state-centric identity scheme from another era, one before the digital, Internet, consumer-driven age. But I won’t dwell on this as the failings of the current scheme have been the topic of endless well-informed analysis and comment already.
Read article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/19/identity_two_dot_oh/
