Tomorrow, the Identity Cards Bill gets its second reading in the House of Commons. Despite rising opposition and negative coverage in the press, I don’t expect the Labour back bench rebellion to be big enough to defeat the bill at this stage. The maths are against it unfortunately.
That said, I want to concentrate on an aspect that hit the news over the weekend. Several news agencies reported that the government will be selling information from the national identity register to private companies. I saw it first in an online report from Yahoo News. This however was disputed in an online version of Sky News where Tom McNulty rebutted the claims:
“The suggestion the Government intends to ‘sell’ information on the ID cards register is complete and utter nonsense.”
You may – given David Blunkett’s open courting of the private sector late last year – decide that the minister doth protest too much. Anyway, despite the protests by McNulty, the Independent on Sunday and the BBC carried the same story. Those of us with a cynical nature might just be enjoying the government’s discomfort. Even if the story is erroneous the government is subject to the same spin and disinformation with which it tries to impose its authoritarian agenda on the British people – the biter is bit.
Whether the story is accurate or not – and I’m keeping an open mind, you have to ask what the companies will get out of it. The NIR will consist of basic details on each individual: Name, address and previous addresses at its most basic. This information is available through the electoral register, so what will paying for access to the NIR give them that the Electoral register doesn’t? Other information listed in the bill will be those occasions when the NIR has been accessed. Here is likely to be the prize – the audit trail. From here it will be possible to deduce all sorts of information about an individual. These could well include spending habits if large purchases are recorded on the system. Certainly banking will find its way onto the register fairly early on as will employment. How accessible this information is and how useful it will be rather depends on the designer of the database. A well designed relational database will enable information to be queried in a useful and logical manner.
The other issue here is who owns the information and who has rights over it. Commercial companies have to seek our permission to sell personal data – we opt in if we are prepared to let them pass on useful demographic information to their partners for the purposes of contacting us with yet more sales material. Like many, I shield myself from the direct marketers. I use the Telephone Preference Service to block telesales calls and I’ve registered with their direct mailing equivalent to stop the mounds of unsolicited junk mail. I refuse to buy from doorstep sellers and if I see them coming, I don’t answer the door. I never, never, respond to solicitations to answer any marketing survey. Indeed, I do the best that I can to remain invisible to these people. If the stories being published on Sunday are true, then these attempts are for nothing. The direct marketers will be granted an open door by the government. Certainly I see nothing here that mentions safeguards and personal privacy.
Ah, yes, personal privacy. That’s the reason I objected to ID cards in the first place.
Whatever happens, it makes sense to resist this bill. It is bad law. More importantly, it is unnecessary law. No rational argument has been put forward to support the need for Britons to carry an identity card. I’ve seen plenty of circular arguments, obfuscation and plain disinformation – but nothing that gives me any satisfaction as to why we need them. As Paul Vigay points out; we don’t.
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