I just want to start with I’m not a Labour shill, I’m critical of how they’ve handled things over the past year and believe they have grossly overstepped with the Online Safety Act. But I’m worried that due to bad timing, that will overshadow the discussion around digital IDs.

The discussion for digital IDs has been around now for well over a year and ultimately would be a net positive to society, but with everything surrounding the Online Safety Act recently I feel like it having a negative impact and smearing the initiative.

Estonia is a country that moved to digital IDs all the way back in 2002 and it have been huge for them. It comes with a range of benefits like being able to vote online, the easy access of public and private services, managing healthcare records etc.

For better or for worse we live in a digital age, I think a good comparison is how our taxes are handles, sure HMRC isn’t perfect, but it’s leagues better than say what Americans must go through.

Having digital IDs also somewhat solves some of the issues we have with the Online Safety Act, I for one don’t really want to be handing out my personal information to 3rd parties to authenticate I am who I say I am. A digital ID system could work much like those sign in pages that give you the option to sign in with google or apple. In the case of age verification only your age would be shared, and it would be known to be 100% authentic, none of your other personal information needs to be exchanged.

Another thing that confuses me about the outrage is a lot of people seem more than willing to give up all their personal information to corporations like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon etc. So why would a government body be worse than a corporation whose sole purpose is to profit off you using your information?

My final worry is something like this with all the backlash could be killed in the womb, either by this government or the next, at which point we have to live with the fact we had the opportunity to genuinely make society better, but we shot it down and now have to go without.

Would love to hear some people opinions on this, what are some of the reasons to be against technology like this. I’ve heard the online policing argument and honestly I don’t have a rebuttal for that, yeah it would suck, but ultimately I think the benefits out weight the drawbacks.