It only now occurs to me how weirdly archaic the UK government’s rhetoric around digital ID really is. Here’s prime minister Keir Starmer in India, quoted in the Daily Express (and many elsewheres):
“I don’t know how many times the rest of you have had to look in the bottom drawer for three bills when you want to get your kids into school or apply for this or apply for that – drives me to frustration.”
His image of the bottom drawer full of old bills is the bit. I asked an 82-year-old female friend: “What do you do if you have to supply a utility bill to confirm your address?” Her response: “I download one.”
Right. And she’s in the exact demographic geeks so often dismiss as technically incompetent. Starmer’s children are teenagers. Lots of people under 40 have never seen a paper statement.
Sure, many people can’t do that download, for various reasons. But they are the same people who will struggle with digital IDs, largely for the same reasons. So claiming people will want digital IDs because they’re more “convenient” is specious. The inconvenience isn’t in obtaining the necessary documentation. It lies in inconsistent, poorly designed submission processes – this format but not that, or requiring an in-person appointment. Digital IDs will provide many more opportunities for technical failure, as the system’s first targets, veterans, may soon find out.
A much cheaper solution for meeting the same goal would be interoperable systems that let you push a button to send the necessary confirmation direct to those who need it, like transferring a bank payment. This is, of course, close to the structure Mydex and researcher Derek McAuley have been working on for years, the idea being to invert today’s centralized databases to give us control of our own data. Instead, Starmer has rummaged in Tony Blair’s bottom drawer to pull out old ID proposals.
In an analysis published by the research organization Careful Industries, Rachel Coldicutt finds a clash: people do want a form of ID that would make life easier, but the government’s interest is in creating an ID that will make public services more efficient. Not the same.
Starmer himself has been in India this week, taking advantage to study its biometric ID system Aadhaar. Per Bloomberg, Starmer met with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Aadhaar’s architect, because 16-year-old Aadhaar is a “massive success”.
According to the Financial Times, Aadhaar has 99% penetration in India, and “has also become the bedrock for India’s domestic online payments network, which has become the world’s largest, and enabled people to easily access capital markets, contributing to the country’s booming domestic investor base.” The FT also reports that Starmer claims Aadhaar has saved India $10 billion a year by reducing fraud and “leakages” in welfare schemes. In April, authentication using Aadhaar passed 150 billion transactions, and continues to expand through myriad sectors where its use was never envisioned. Visitors to India often come away impressed. However…
At Yale Insights, Ted O’Callahan tells the story of Aadhaar’s development. Given India’a massive numbers of rural poor with no way to identify themselves or access financial services, he writes, the project focused solely on identification.
Privacy International examines the gap between principle and practice. There have been myriad (and continuing) data breaches, many hit barriers to access, and mandatory enrollment for accessing many social protection schemes adds to preexisting exclusion.
In a posting at Open Democracy, Aman Sethi is even less impressed after studying Aadhaar for a decade. The claim of annual savings of $10 billion is not backed by evidence, he writes, and Aadhaar has brought “mass surveillance; a denial of services to the elderly, the impoverished and the infirm; compromised safety and security, and a fundamentally altered relationship between citizen and state.” As in Britain in 2003, when then-prime minister Tony Blair proposed the entitlement card, India cited benefit fraud as a key early justification for Aadhaar. Trying to get it through, Blair moved on to preventing illegal working and curbing identity theft. For Sethi, a British digital ID brings a society “where every one of us is a few failed biometrics away from being postmastered” (referring to the postmaster Horizon scandal).
In a recent paper for the Indian Journal of Law and Legal Research, Angelia Sajeev finds economic benefits but increased social costs. At the Christian Science Monitor, Riddhima Dave reports that many other countries that lack ID systems, particularly developing countries, are looking to India as a model. The law firm AM Legals warns of the spread of data sharing as Aadhaar has become ubiquitous, increasing privacy risks. Finally, at the Financial Times, John Thornhill noted in 2021 the system’s extraordinary mission creep: the “narrow remit” of 2009 to ease welfare payments and reduce fraud has sprawled throughout the public sector from school enrollment to hospital admissions, and into private companies.
Technology secretary Liz Kendall told Parliament this week that the digital ID will absolutely not be used for tracking. She is utterly powerless to promise that on behalf of the governments of the future.
If Starmer wants to learn from another country, he would do well to look at those problems and consider the opportunity costs. What has India been unable to do while pursuing Aadhaar? What could *we* do with the money and resources digital IDs will cost?
Illustrations: In 1980’s Yes, Minister (S01e04, “Big Brother”), minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) tries to explain why his proposed National Integrated Database is not a “Big Brother”.
Update: Spelling of “Aadhaar” corrected.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.