Source: http://www.privacyworld.com/
Privacy World - The WORLD'S SHREWDEST PRIVACY NEWSLETTER
UK ID card service mounts birth, marriage, death land grab
The UK Identity & Passport Service (IPS) has staged an identity
landgrab on birth, marriage and death records. From April 2008
the General Register Office, which is responsible for recording
these matters and is currently a directorate of the Office of
National Statistics, is to become part of IPS, meaning that IPS
will be logging you from the moment you're born until the moment
you die.
The logic of the move is chilling. The UK ID card scheme itself only
requires registration for an ID card from age 16, while the passport
part of the deal only, obviously, needs to have data on people who
have passports. But... IPS has entirely and obviously unfeasible
plans to make money by promoting itself to the status of the UK's de
facto identity services broker, with passport validation and identity
verification services being early manifestations of how it proposes to
make money out of this. But if IPS is to be able to grow its
offerings from simply checking if a passport is genuine into a general
ID verification service, then it makes sense to have everybody in the
database, whether they like it or not.
IPS also intends to use biographical footprint data as part of the
passport application process, so the birth record has a relevance in
that sense. As Home Office Minister Meg Hillier* says, "In order
to... fully realise the benefits of combining registration of life
events in England and Wales and the issuing of passports, it is
sensible that the IPS and GRO should be part of the same
organisation." It's worth noting here that the Scottish citizenry has
some opportunity to maintain a slightly greater level of freedom, or
at the very least to be entertained by some grandstanding on the
subject from First Minister Alec Salmond. Passports are a UK national
issue, births, marriages and deaths are devolved - in Scotland, to a
hostile Nationalist administration.
Also worth flagging is that reference to "registration of life
events". This relates in some measure to the Office of National
Statistics' idea of "through life records"
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/05/uk_birth_certificates_to_morph/),
which were intended to take the basic and relatively uncontentious
matter of birth, marriage and death registration and flesh it out into
the somewhat more chilling notion of of a continually updated life
record. So was that Web 2.0, or just Stasi?
Considering the new owners, it's now pretty clear which it is. The
ONS/GRO has already been co-operating with IPS on data sharing, one of
the objectives of this being to tackle "Day of the Jackal" ID fraud,
around 30 years after Frederick Forsyth first drew it to the world's
attention. Previous statements on the relationship between the
ONS/PRO side of ID and the IPS spoke of increased co-operation and
data sharing, and during the passage of the ID Cards Act it became
clear that the ONS' plans to build a population register via the
Citizen Information Project were a dead duck.
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/28/nir_uturn/) Two population
registers made no sense at all, and as the National Identity Register
was flavour of the month, that was obviously the one they were going
to keep.
But how far down this road would you go? The answer, evidenced by
this week's announcement, appears to be all the way. The government
has followed up the effective merger of the ONS' population register
with the NIR by subsuming the GRO in the IPS Borg, and the
uncontentious register that previously existed will, as of next April,
be run by an organisation which proposes to make money out of
compiling and continually updating the "biographical footprint" of
every live individual in the UK (see here
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/23/idcard_passport_roots/) for
more detail on the identity verification service and its roots in IPS'
Personal Identification Project, PIP). So not a lot of controversy
there, then. If you're thinking of getting born anytime after Q1 208,
you might like to consider doing it somewhere else.
Previous Home Office ministers in charge of passports and ID cards
(there have been many) have been given relatively prosaic titles. In
keeping (presumably) with the Brown administration's slightly more
Orwellian edge, however, Hillier is "Home Office Minister responsible
for Identity." Just identity, but all of it.
The above article appeared in The UK Register |
