First the U.K., Next the U.S.? Britain's Digital ID Plan Should Scare Americans.
Once created, a digital ID system will prove catnip to politicians who want to track where we go, online and off.
The U.K. may be about to get even more dystopian. Prime Minister Keir Starmer proposed a plan last week that would require every adult in the United Kingdom to have a digital ID in order to work in the country, with these IDs becoming mandatory by 2029. Employers would be required to consult an app-based system containing a person's name, photo, birth date, nationality, and residency status, rather than check physical IDs or National Insurance numbers (the U.K.'s version of a Social Security number) before hiring.
"The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK," reports Sky News. "The so-called 'Brit card' will be subject to a consultation and would require legislation to be passed, before being rolled out."
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In the U.K. and the U.S., authorities already employ an array of government-issued identification mechanisms—passports, physical driver's licenses, Social Security or National Insurance numbers. So how different could a digital ID be?
Very different, say civil libertarians, privacy experts, and cybersecurity gurus.
A National Tracking System
"Currently, when somebody presents a plastic driver's license, that interaction is between the two parties, and the government is none the wiser," noted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in June. "But digital driver licenses"—and other sorts of digital IDs—"are being built so that the system notifies the government every time an identity card is used, giving it a bird's-eye view of where, when, and to whom people are showing their identity. That 'phone home' functionality becomes especially intrusive as people start having to use digial ID online, giving the government the ability to track your browsing history."
Starmer isn't calling for an all-encompassing digital ID, where all your online activities are linked. "Under the proposals, anybody starting a new job would be required to hold the digital ID, which could then be checked against a central database of those with the right to work in the UK," Sky News reports. That sounds like an ID with limited information—for now.
But earlier this year, "Downing Street was exploring proposals for a digital ID card to crack down on illegal migration, rogue landlords and exploitative work," The Guardian reports. That doesn't sound like a simple employability check.
And it's not hard to imagine that a digital ID system, once created, would prove catnip to politicians and lawmakers who could take it even further. If you've already got this ID system, why not use that for taxes, travel, health records, and government benefits, too? And why not require it for creating social media accounts or logging on to age-gated websites while we're at it?
Right now, one reason online age verification is tricky is that there are lots of different ways to do it, and companies are being asked to implement their own protocols. If digital IDs exist, you can see how they might empower authorities to start demanding even more age verification.
Guardian columnist Gabby Hinsliff imagines other possibilities:
Though Britons wouldn't have to produce their IDs when stopped on the street under Starmer's plans, a future administration could easily change that. Just imagine how useful ID cards would be in rounding people up for Trump-style mass deportations—especially if that effort was linked to facial recognition technology already in use by the British police, creating a system capable of automatically scanning crowds anywhere from a rush-hour Tube station to a football match and matching faces against an immigration database.
Hinsliff is horrified by such a prospect. Many will not be—especially if it's sold as a tool to stop some group they do not like.
Such a move would compromise not just freedom from government surveillance but also people's cybersecurity. "A centralised digital ID scheme would also be a honeypot for hackers and foreign adversaries, creating huge digital security risks for our data," warns the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.
Coming to America?
Americans might think this is something only the British must worry about. But a lot of bad ideas regarding technology and speech in Europe, and especially the U.K., seem to wind their way over to the U.S. eventually. The U.K.'s Online Safety Act has spawned similar regulations or calls for similar regulations in the United States.
The U.S. has already taken steps toward creating a digital ID-like system, with Real ID. And as of June, 13 states had launched digital driver's license systems and an additional 21 have passed legislation that would enable or study such a system, according to the ACLU. New Jersey just enacted such a bill in August.
The ACLU has developed some recommendations for how digital IDs can be built in ways that preserve privacy. Meanwhile, more than 80 individuals and organizations have signed onto a letter saying that digital ID systems must be built without what they call the "phone home" capabilities that alert authorities every time a digital ID is used.
"We call on authorities everywhere to favor identity solutions that have no phone home capability whatsoever, and to prioritize privacy and security over interoperability and ease of implementation," the letter says.
As this push makes clear, there are better and worse ways to build digital IDs. But in the current climate of heightened suspicion toward immigrants, free speech, privacy, protest, and just about everything else, the chances of authorities—in the U.K. or the U.S.—implementing the best version seem increasingly slim.
Follow-ups: Age Verification on Bluesky, Diddy's Mann Act Defense, MAGA TikTok
'Age assurance' checks for Ohio Bluesky users: As it did with Wyoming and South Dakota, Bluesky is implementing "an age assurance solution" for Ohio users, in response to the state's new age verification law. The company has also adopted region-specific policies for Mississippi and the U.K.:
"In the UK, we complied with a new law that requires platforms to restrict children from accessing adult content," the company posted on its website:
In Mississippi, the law requires us to restrict access to the site for every unverified user. To implement this change, we would have had to invest substantial resources in a solution that we believe limits free speech and disproportionately harms smaller platforms. We chose not to offer our service there at this time while legal challenges continue.
South Dakota and Wyoming have also passed online safety laws that impose requirements on services like ours. These are very similar to the requirements of the UK Online Safety Act. So, as we did in the UK, we'll enable Kids Web Services' (KWS) age verification solution for users in these states. Through KWS, Bluesky users in South Dakota and Wyoming can choose from multiple methods to verify their age. We believe this approach currently strikes the right balance. Bluesky will remain available to users in these states, and we will not need to restrict the app for everyone.
TikTok's MAGA turn? President Donald Trump said (jokingly?) that if he could make TikTok "100 percent MAGA," he would, before adding—not quite reassuringly—that it "unfortunately" will not work that way and "everyone is going to be treated fairly."
But the coerced sale of U.S. TikTok operations to American investors, brokered by the Trump administration, is raising some disturbing fears. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good statement on the situation:
TikTok was never proven to be a current national security problem, so it's hard to say the sale will alleviate those unproven concerns. And it remains to be seen if the deal places any limits on the new ownership sharing user data with foreign governments or anyone else—the security concern that purportedly justified the forced sale. As for the algorithm, if the concern had been that TikTok could be a conduit for Chinese government propaganda—a concern the Supreme Court declined to even consider—people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for U.S. government propaganda. An administration official reportedly has said the new TikTok algorithm will be "retrained" with U.S. data to make sure the system is "behaving properly."
The trouble with Diddy's First Amendment argument: Sean Combs' lawyers are arguing that he should have been immune from prosecution under the Mann Act—a law that prohibits facilitating someone's travel across state lines for commercial sex, among other purposes—because "he was a producer of amateur porn," as lawyer Alexandra Shapiro put it. "It's well settled that this type of amateur porn, whether it's live or recorded, is protected by the First Amendment," she told the court last week.
The Mann Act is a bad law with a history of selective and bigoted enforcement, of targeting consensual activity, and of being used to control women's sexuality. I agree that Combs should not have been prosecuted under it, because it's a law that should not exist.
But Combs—who was found guilty of flying (consenting) male sex workers across state lines to engage in "freak offs" with him and various women—faces an uphill battle in arguing that filming these encounters turns them from illegal prostitution to legal pornography. Making pornography legal requires a lot of paperwork and a lot of follow-up regulations.
"The prosecution is going to immediately ask for model releases, IDs and all the other things we do to remain…viable," writes Mike Stabile, policy director at the Free Speech Coalition, an organization representing the porn industry. "We're not a get out of jail free card," he adds—and the sex industry is not "some weird netherworld just over the county line where normal rules don't apply."
More Sex & Tech News
• Amazon is being forced to pay $2.5 billion for making it easier to sign up for Prime, reports Reason's Jack Nicastro.
• A large new study offers a "ringing endorsement" of school cellphone bans, said The Economist. Not so fast, writes Stetson University professor Chris Ferguson:
In reality, most of the study's findings showed no benefit from cellphone bans. As the abstract states "…there were no significant changes in overall student well-being, academic motivation, digital usage, or experiences of online harassment."
The one finding for grades is so exceptionally small (d= 0.086) it is likely statistical noise…a common problem in social science that causes enormous misinformation and confusion. An effect so unreliably tiny should never have been interpreted as supporting cellphone bans.
In fact, this study is better evidence against cellphone bans than for them.
• Meet the "brilliant, workaholic teenagers" of San Francisco's AI industry.
• Adam Kovacevich of the Chamber of Progress on the Google antitrust case: "If you don't want Trump overseeing Google's search results (and I don't), be glad Judge [Amit] Mehta rejected the [Justice Department's] proposed technical committee that would have done exactly that." Read his whole thread here.
• "America rightly prides itself on free speech. But that is relatively new. And more fragile than many realize," writes Dan Gardner in a piece about this history of the Federal Communications Commission and the "polite censorship" of radio back when it was a new technology.
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