Comment by gambiting
3 days ago
UK is stupidly far behind on this though. On one hand the digitization of government services is really well done(thanks to the fantastic team behind .gov websites), but on the other it's like being in the dark ages of tech. My native country has physical ID cards that contain my personal certificate that I can use to sign things or to - gasp! - prove that I am who I say I am. There is a government app that you can use to scan your ID card using the NFC chip in your phone, after providing it with a password that you set when you got the card it produces a token that can then be used to verify your identy or sign documents digitally - and those signatures legally have the same weight as real paper signatures.
UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough. But my general point is that UK could just look over at how other countries are doing it and copy good solutions to this problem, instead of whatever nonsense is being done right now with the age verification process being entirely outsourced to private companies.
> UK is in this weird place where there isn't one kind of ID that everyone has - for most people it's the driving licence, but obviously that's not good enough.
As a Brit I personally went through a phase of not really existing — no credit card, no driving licence, expired passport - so I know how annoying this can be.
But it’s worth noting that we have this situation not because of mismanagement or technical illiteracy or incompetence but because of a pretty ingrained (centuries old) political and cultural belief that the police shouldn’t be able to ask you “papers please”. We had ID cards in World War II, everyone found them egregious and they were scrapped. It really will be discussed in those terms each time it is mentioned, and it really does come down to this original aspect of policing by consent.
So the age verification thing is running up against this lack of a pervasive ID, various KYC situations also do, we can get an ID card to satisfy verification for in-person voting if we have no others, but it is not proof of identity anywhere else, etc.
It is frustrating to people who do not have that same cultural touchstone but the “no to ID” attitude is very very normal; generally the UK prefers this idea of contextual, rather than universal ID. It’s a deliberate design choice.
Same in Australia - there was a referendum about whether we should have government-issued ID cards, and the answer was an emphatic "NO". And Australia is hitting or going to hit the same problem with the age verification thing for social media.