The UK is intro­du­cing offi­cial ID cards over the next couple of years.

There has been a massive amount of polit­ical debate, and a lot of vocal oppos­i­tion, mostly through the No2ID campaign.

Personally, I’m on the fence. Privacy is already at a massive premium, with CCTV cameras, satel­lite networks, the UK census, voter regis­tra­tion, lost disks and laptops, stop and search. Do we really want to give the govern­ment more than we already do?

However I’m a firm advoc­ate of tech­no­logy as a help, not a hindrance, and the idea of a data­base which holds my inform­a­tion cent­rally is actu­ally quite appeal­ing, and poten­tially (though this is never guar­an­teed!) it could be help­ful in cutting through the swathes of inform­a­tion I have to provide all the time to prove who I am and what I’m entitled to.

As an offi­cial (and some­what pain­ful!) fence sitter, I take a look at the latest consulta­tion on ID cards from the govern­ment, and I am some­what baffled (as I frequently am) as to what it all actu­ally means, in a prac­tical sense. This thing is 97 pages long. Ninety-seven!

So, to kick this whole thing off, and do what I prom­ised to do, here’s a Totally Unofficial 10 page trans­la­tion!

National ID Cards — 10 page summary

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Corinne Pritchard

Information Designer at Simply Understand

I believe design and design­ers can and should make the world a better place. I love design­ing things that help people under­stand complex ideas.

Latest posts by Corinne Pritchard (see all)

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