00:00:02
[Music] [Music] Hello and welcome back to Tech TV. Today we’re talking about an announcement that the government in the UK is making around digital I keys ID cards. Essentially what the government has said is that they’re going to be introducing ID cards for the first time in something like 70 years for all adults in the UK. Now this is not a new topic. Uh I myself have written on this on uh a number of different occasions talking about the potential benefits as well as the challenges and there have been certain
00:00:56
key politicians like Tony Blair and William Hey advocating the use of cards for some time but at every previous attempt it’s been shot down because it’s been an unpopular measure measure that has been voted down by uh parliament on every occasion. Pete, as we approach a big announcement now, the government is focusing on the fact that it’s a solution potentially to the immigration problem. How accurate is this? And what are the benefits and challenges that we’re going to be facing as the
00:01:31
government seeks to introduce digital ID cards? >> Well, I think the biggest the biggest challenge that the government’s going to be facing is trying to do the technology behind all of this. The government doesn’t have exactly the greatest track record on technology. If it did, we would have been making uh uh considerable advancees out of the NHS database, which is probably one of the most valuable databases in the world. So, um that’s one of the challenges. There is also going to be an additional challenge
00:02:02
politically. And I suppose one of the other challenges, massive challenge politically for the government in in all of this is going to be the presence of Tony Blair in all of this. This is a man who has received 257 million pounds from uh Larry Ellison who may have a vested interest in all of this and he seems to be affecting government policy. So I think that that’s going to be a significant issue. But then the final hurdle will be convincing the population at large about this because the population don’t trust government. The
00:02:38
the the in poll after poll after poll we find that the organization that the population trusts less is government. Obviously they’re going to be big technology challenges here as well as the sort of sentiment of the public. to help us address some of those technology challenges. We’ve got a special guest. Um, I’d like to uh welcome into the studio coming from a a very early hour where she is in in the States, Irene, the group CEO of Data Swift. Irene, thank you so much for joining us. Um,
00:03:15
we’d like to to start by looking at the potential benefits here. I don’t know, Irene, if you could focus on what you think could potentially be gained from ID cards. >> I think um we we live in a a digital economy. Um and I think uh digital identity is part of a wider understanding that there needs to be some proper infrastructure in the uh in on in the digital economy around identity. The issue is not um whether identity is needed. It is definitely needed. The question is who issues it
00:03:57
and who holds the data? Who owns it? There are huge benefits for that. Number one, if you think about it from the disenfranchised, from the marginalized, it gives them visibility. Now, visibility is a double-edged sword. It it gives you visibility so that you can be seen and heard and access to resource. But who sees, who hears, who tracks becomes you know the issue. So a huge benefits because you visibility gives um investability you know visibility gives the ability to say I am who I am. I’ve done amazing things. I’m
00:04:30
credible. I can get loans. I can get healthcare. That visibility is an incredible benefit of digital ID. But one of the things though with that is it’s also a means by which you can be tracked, isn’t it? I mean, and that’s that’s where this trust element comes in. But let’s go let’s go back to to to that a little later. I mean this notion of the benefits of ID, one of the problems there will be my my ID card will become me and then what about these other governments that will
00:05:06
say hang on give us your ID card so we know who you are and they may not have the same uh interest in me uh that I think they have. Yes, I think um GDPR rules and also data protection rules globally have already um made that clear that any request for identity and any request for any information about you has to be backed by a legitimate purpose. If you want to understand me from a tax perspective, ask me for my text number. If you want to treat me, ask me for my NHS number. And I think the idea of an allencompassing
00:05:45
one piece of digital ID, it’s a really bad idea. What I would like to see, and I think that’s where the biggest potential benefits can be unlocked, is that you tie legitimate purpose to the different parts of your identity and people who want those proofs can ask for the different parts of your identity and you can present them at the right time. I think we tend to conflate the fact that you get the benefits of ID but then there’s just one issuer of it and it’s all-encompassing for everything. I I the
00:06:20
current technology available in this world today suggests that you do not need to do that anymore. Back in the day, yes, oh my god, just you know give me a card already, you know. But today you don’t have to do that. Today someone can nudge you to even answer the smallest question. Surely you can break down proofs into different parts of who a person is. >> But from the practicality side of things, the government is saying at the moment that every adult in the UK will need to have an ID card, but they won’t
00:06:50
be forced to use it. There will always be other means of identifying yourself. And I’ve done some studies and and some articles where I’ve identified something like 46 different ways of identifying yourself for different government services in the UK. And that includes everything from your NHS number to your passport number to your driving license number to your national insurance number to your unique tax record for HMRC and tax. What we have here is an absolute mess and that’s preventing integrated
00:07:22
government. If we could have an a unified system, then that would potentially provide benefits surely because we’d be able to crack down on fraud because there would be a unique identifier that would be common across various different government departments and we’d have integrated government so that you could have some linkage between your benefits and your tax or between your health and your social support. Um surely this is all to the benefit. I mean this is assuming that the government can get it right. And on top
00:07:54
of that, there will be instances where there will be pressure for this to become compulsory rather than optional. And when it becomes compulsory, you won’t just need an online version. You’ll need some sort of physical version because there are always going to be instances where you’ll need to prove your identity and you won’t have access. So these benefits surely are massive. What’s wrong therefore in a single identity and and a single provider of identity? >> Um, okay, let let me break that down a
00:08:31
little bit. Um if if you think about the parts of you um that lives in 10 different towers, just think about 10 different buildings as government agencies or enterprises or companies that have pieces of you. And you’ve got think about 10 buildings and you’ve got to want to share. The government’s idea is these 10 buildings go into one center building and that center building is going to pull from everyone to give that one center building. And in order to do that, you’ve got to build these sky bridges between these 10
00:09:10
buildings. That’s very expensive sky bridges. There is a simpler way which is the guy at the ground floor me who owns all the data or who who is part of the information invol uh across all 10. If it was mine it’d be a simple wallet isn’t it? In another lock world today that’s what we have. We have 10 cards but we go everywhere with it. We show whichever card is uh needed at each time because I own these cards. So instead of sky bridges into a center, could you just not bring the information to the
00:09:50
ground floor to me? I can walk around at the lobby towards 10 buildings and show who I am. There are two different ways of looking at it. the centralized system in the center or decentralized to people who own their information and therefore present the necessary proof provided by these towers and the the centralized system when when they’re asked of it. I think this is the key, isn’t it? because it was being argued yesterday in on the BBC and in the Guardian that uh the way that you win this argument, this
00:10:30
trust argument is with distributed data. If you’re having the data held centrally, then you get this issue of a lack of trust. And to be perfectly honest, we do need to evolve this, don’t we, Irene? because it was William the Conquerrew who came up with the idea of a centralized database so he could tax people so that he could scare the um let’s let’s be polite who could scare the hell out of them. Um and and that’s what we’ve got to go away from. The government doesn’t trust the people and
00:11:02
there is yet another factor in that too which is it’s my identity. Yeah. I should be the one who owns this and who actually negotiates this interaction with the government. Is that a fair? >> Yes. And and if you look at civil society, we’ve never had a breakdown in trust till we kind of went into the digital economy and started to think that that there is a surveillance going on or in normal civil society in the analog world, we hold cards. Nobody look at what our cards are. Nobody looks at
00:11:36
our wallets. Quite private. and I bring whatever I choose. Why can’t we mirror that world rather than create a world where trust is now needed because you’ve changed the way civil society fundamentally worked which was I am private. I have a right to privacy. I have a right to create my distributed self in the form of a crazy little wallet and the cards I have and the loyalty bits and pieces that I have. Why can’t that be the world? because that was what civil society was built on these markets.
00:12:11
That’s great. And I think the distributed model is one that I think most privacy campaigners and a lot of technologists would argue for. The problem we have though is as I mentioned we already have 46 different systems and we’re still maintaining all of these old systems and we’re just now overlaying a 47th and therefore we have to keep all of these maintained and therefore the weaknesses and the fraud and the problems that already exist in all of the existing systems is still there and we’re just providing
00:12:47
extra vulnerabilities in a system where we actually know that the government have made mistakes in the past with a lot of major systems. So if we come on to look at the potential risks here, they could be enormous. And at the same time, here in the UK, we’re in a society with more CCTV cameras than almost any other society in the world. Our faces are already being surveiled and we’re being tracked. and our faces are a bit like an ID card already wherever we go which is a unique identifier. Um do we
00:13:23
need ID cards on top of that? I mean what are the implications here of when things go wrong and how badly can they go wrong? >> How how long is that piece of string? Uh um I think when we look at the risks they are the biggest risk is as you say you keep building up these centralized system and storing them. You’ve got to maintain them and then they become you know honeypotss for cyber security attacks. um distributing does make it safer, does make it um with a lower surface area of attack. But I think one
00:14:05
of the biggest risk I see is the fact that the value of these proofs, these data that prove who we are and can prove what we do. It’s huge for the market. Instead of showing an um an ID card, I just have to show that I’m above 18. Instead of um explaining why is it that I’m good for $200 loan, I just have to show my transactions on my small little shop that I’ve been, you know, operating for for the last 10 years. All these sit in the centralized system and the loss of its usability and and value while it
00:14:48
sits there. To me, that’s the biggest problem. It’s the biggest risk. The UK is struggling in economic growth. Data is a biggest fuel of that growth because it gives visibility and voice to people who then participate in well functioning markets. The way data has to come out so that it can participate so that people can participate in these markets. the t the the risk is that if you keep it locked up yes it’s great for government’s own use but the risk is then the threat is to growth the threat
00:15:27
is to the value and the economic progress of the country I feel that is a huge risk now in the world of digital public infrastructure that everyone else have been talking about in the rest of the world the market actually subsidizes the cost of holding all these proofs because if the data is coming out safely with the right guardrails and used well in the markets, the cost to maintain substantially goes down because the market starts taking on that cost and that could not just reduce the cyber security risk and threat but create the
00:16:08
growth mechanism that increases wealth creation and prosperity of the country. So it’s a little bit of you’ve got to seize the opportunity to lower that risk if you know what I mean. >> I mean that’s a big it’s a huge point isn’t it? Because cyber security if it is in one place then you need one attack. If it’s distributed and everybody has got their own little wallet and there’s millions of people then there’s there has to be millions of attacks. So it becomes much much more
00:16:42
difficult for somebody to attack. I mean there’s another point isn’t there too which is the centralized databases tend to create a prismatic view of an individual. That is you know the bit that you can see for the purposes of that database and it’s going to be very difficult to challenge that if it’s sat in this centralized place isn’t it Irene? Yes. And I think um we see that in a lot of the geopolitical tensions. Um and we see that in the way we as society is managing our social media, our Tik Toks.
00:17:21
Um we are getting more and more polarized uh between who we are. We see that manifested in who we think we are, conservative, liberal, male, female. The the risk is also the the hardening of a person’s persona making him feel that he is that and therefore he needs to be consistently that human beings are notoriously inconsistent and we should completely celebrate the fact that I am possibly a a a you know nitpicker control freak on Tuesday but completely a freewheeling spirit on Thursday right
00:17:58
I mean we have lost a bit of that because I think digital identity tends to make us far more rigid and therefore polarizing society into who we think we are and who we think we need to maintain as who we are and and and that identity and that is a serious risk because it it polarizes society but it also creates a lot of tensions and conflicts within ourselves >> and also there is a danger because we’re going to get locked into that because to actually get certain services we are going to have to manifest particular
00:18:35
characteristics. So that in a sense you have to gain the system um which which is going to be quite difficult for people. >> Yes. And I think um for particularly for a generation that’s growing up with the the digital realm um if we don’t start to allow for a sense of liberation of who we are in the form of the identity and the data we hold because as individuals we don’t hold anything. We we don’t own anything. They’re all sitting in all the institutions that can prove who we are.
00:19:12
If it doesn’t come back to us to be distributed in the correct way, we are left with the people who shout the loudest, the people who gave us the ideas. And if it was that, then that’s who I am. And it is a self-reinforcing loop. It’s um it’s it’s it’s a real tragedy. >> Now, Irene, what then do you think is the solution to this? you’ve come up with uh your ideas um and a lot of people seem to be going along those same lines and Tim Berners Lee uh arguably the man who was responsible for a
00:19:49
certain amount of this uh he now says that we should have a distributed identity what is it that you are doing >> um at data swift our wallet um separates the proof from the data that proves it so you can issue a proof u I’m above 18 That’s a blank template. Um, but the data that makes the proof real to mint the proof is owned by you. So the proof template guy can say I you can mint it with bank data that proves that you’re 18. Mint it with national ID. So once it’s minted and you have a proof, you
00:20:23
can use it. You’re not tracked because the data that it came from is not the same as where the proof comes from. So the the issue of the proof templates can be able to tell where it’s used without knowing who is using. So by keeping the template separated from the data that mints it, it keeps you private, but it also gives the proof necessary because you know you got getting it from the source of truth. So I’m a market design economist. So, we’ve designed the wallet to be a a sort of four-sided market so
00:20:54
that data can come out properly to mint with different kinds of proofs to be used in different kinds of way. And that could be something really simple like I listen to Taylor Swift so I’m going to mint a proof called I’m a Swifty you know it could be very low assurance type of proof but it could also be very high assurance proof a credit score for example minted from uh a certain set of interactions. We tend to look at the wallet as a decentralized marketplace of one of me and the different
00:21:25
essentially then well I mean what we’re saying is this is an affirmation. The mistake of the past is to have this centralized system where there is somebody else who is owning your identity and owning your choices. What you’re saying is that in the future you should be given a stake in your identity. You should be the one who affirms your identity. Correct. And but then the people who govern the rules of how that proof is going to be used across the world or whatever should also
00:21:53
have the right to provide governance rules around how and where the proofs would be accepted. And by separating the two, we make it much more uh a better functioning market. And the mistake of the past was to think that they all had to be one provider and one place. It it doesn’t have to be. This sounds great in theory and obviously there are many different models that have been espoused in the past. Unfortunately, most governments and this government’s included have a propensity to want to do
00:22:28
their own thing, want to invent their own technology rather than take what is very good technology off the shelf available elsewhere. Um this is a failing that this government has had and it’s got one login at the moment which is a system that it adopted only a year or two ago and now it’s potentially superseding that with another system. Um and it’s yet to get the first one completely working or completely secure or adopted to any great extent. And therefore we have a litany of problems
00:22:58
here um with a government which obviously has a propensity to want to do its own thing to want to have ownership. What is the argument here and are there examples elsewhere in the world where it has worked well where a government has gone down the route that you’re describing and this has been a real benefit. What can we learn from best practice elsewhere? I think um we are at very early stages of governments understanding digital ID. I think there’s a tendency for governments to think that once they
00:23:36
issue the ID, it will be used. The use case will come and I think many governments are starting to realize that the only use case they have found are the use cases of themselves using it for government for the purpose of government. I think that misses a point in terms of what the ID and the data of governments can do in the markets. What is becoming very clear is the issuance of a digital ID isn’t enough. They have to start thinking about its distribution. In fact, the distribution of the information and the ID is the
00:24:15
biggest challenge for us. We run networks. we um you know aside from the wallet the wallets of course operate within the network we find that in many governments we have interfaced with and I’m sorry I really can’t talk about some of these case studies right now but I’m happy to you know buy you a drink and talk about it a little bit more but um what we find that most governments are starting to realize they do need a network they do need distribution and distribution is a totally different
00:24:49
problem and challenge from the creation of the idea. I think if you solve the distribution problem, you also solve how it’s created because distribution and the market and the network that uses it will discipline how and what tech you use. That is I think becoming very clear. Um I I can say however that we are about to make a quite sizable announcement on this in the next few days that um when it comes to the bottom of the pyramid in other parts of the world when it comes to visibility of the
00:25:19
bottom pyramid the the the most disenfranchise the poorest that visibility when they own their data is collective power at an unprecedented scale. That’s why it needs to come out and come out properly. I mean that’s the point isn’t it Irene if you give people a stake in their data then they actually say yeah this is my data and it’s in my interest to look after this data also in an AI world you can then say to people yeah we’ll also give you a return on your data we’ll give you um some money or some some
00:25:58
something back from allowing us to use your data and we’ll we’ll create an agreement with you about the use of that data. So for example, you could say to the NHS, right, let’s let let’s set up a situation where we can get all of the value from this data and we can make huge health advances and as a result of that we can either make the system more efficient or we can make the treatment more efficient. >> That’s correct. Yes. No government is going to win this. At some point your identity is having to
00:26:34
also go across borders by creating something that’s centralized. You are also um basically you know uh kicking yourself a little bit because that means you’ve got even more towers to integrate with when we start taking ID across borders and that gets more and more expensive. ID that travels with the person in a distributed way makes for a greater Britain outside of Britain. It’s a huge resource that potentially creates a wider um diaspora of what Britain means as an economy. It has a and and it opens up
00:27:20
opportunities that you haven’t even started to imagine. Every government can’t do this. They have to think above borders. This is the future. It’s not just centralizing. It is are you locking yourself up into one country and inhibiting the growth of the country by creating an ID and not letting the markets do its job. So you know what we say, oh government and they can centralize a huge benefit and there’s big risk. The biggest I this is risk is that it they they’re not thinking about
00:27:58
borders >> and I think the borders issue is going to be paramount here because we’ve already had some kickback from the first minister in Northern Ireland where she says that the whole proposal contravenes what was agreed in the Good Friday agreement between Ireland and the UK meaning that if we have a centralized system is which is UK UK specific then it can’t include Northern Ireland and therefore we need already the moment we try to introduce something to think about the crossborder dimension because
00:28:35
Northern Ireland needs to have a system that would work for both the British and the Irish in order for us to underpin the Good Friday agreement. So there are practicalities here that I think we need to think of immediately. >> Yep. or it just goes down to another uh data point of another mistake. >> Yeah. But I mean a lot of this is all about assertion, isn’t it? As you say, you should only need a certain amount of data for a certain amount of function that exists in your distributed
00:29:08
uh card or whatever it is that you’re going you’re going to be using. So all you need to be able to assert is that you are from a particular country and there is this amount of information with you. You don’t want to be want to give out any more information up because why should you? Because it’s information for a particular purpose. >> And to be honest, it really shouldn’t be that hard, should it? You know, because you give it back to me, I can bring it across borders as I
00:29:37
do. I bring my laptop, I bring my device, I bring my stuff. Well, could we not digitize the right thing? In theory, you say it really shouldn’t be that hard. But the government has a litany of mistakes with a whole load of major IT projects. Even the one login system which was only introduced a year or two ago have had major technical problems. So yeah, I I agree it shouldn’t be that hard, but the government has a a track record of making it very hard or making it seem very hard. I mean one one of the reasons
00:30:12
for this is underlying government infrastructure unfortunately forces this central distributed so sorry this centralized system of thinking about people. It’s the underlying architecture. I mean look at it. We’ve got centralized computer systems in the UK which are so old that the programmers to program them are dying. They are they you can’t find people with those skills at the moment. I mean, in a sense, really, the government’s got to get up to speed with technology as well as the
00:30:49
reasons why it installed it in the first place. >> Yes. Um, I think I mean, I’m not here to comment about why they like big bloated budgets for big IT projects when there are much better solutions and great technology architectures elsewhere. But I do say that I think governments are used to doing things themselves. they’re not used to being using technology that has uh that that the market hugely subsidized. Um but yet the market has shown time and time again you can buy subscription at 1999 you don’t have to
00:31:22
be build that you know so lots of technologies available whether they want to use it well they have their own reason why they want to have a 50 million pound budget right >> and the 50 million pound budget isn’t just for building something new it’s for maintaining the 46 other systems it’s still got running many of which as Pete says are archaic Irene thank you so much for joining joining us. Uh it’s been a great debate and we look forward to hopefully continuing this debate as
00:31:52
things unfold and we learn more about how the UK is doing this and possibly we hear from the announcements that you have coming up that will give examples of best practice elsewhere. >> It’s a real pleasure to be invited. Thank you very much. >> Cheers. Thank you. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]
