garrence Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 No,sorry I meant that if the cards were compulsory we'd still need a passport to go anywhwre other than Europe... Oh I see. The idea is that you can use one or the other in European Union countries only. Not anywhere else in Europe or outside of Europe, where you'll still need the passport. Ignoring all the other bad things about ID cards and just looking at the costs compared with a passport - as a passport lasts 10 years, it seems well worth the extra £17 to ensure global travel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garrence Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 Would you be giving your identity away or merely evidence of what that identity is? Cue Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garrence Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 On Radio 4 now is a programme about John Simpson going back to East Germany and the Czech Republic to hear people's experiences under communism. They keep talking about the secret police being everywhere and the chilling effect they had on society. It seems odd that, in the month we are celebrating 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, to be launching a surveillance scheme in Britain that would make the STASI jealous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonofAna Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 Why the hell are they charging for it and how can they make that work when people on benefits will never be able to afford that much - as well as people on low incomes? I like the idea of an id card but I do not see that they can charge you for it or charge you if you lose it. So a good idea becomes a money making scheme. However - if the costs are a one off small payment then I have no problem with it. Dragon of Ana Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonofAna Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 Can you point out where it says about these costs please? Dragon of Ana Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garrence Posted November 17, 2009 Share Posted November 17, 2009 It costs money because They Say So. And because it helps hide the true cost of the scheme. Some figures are from the IPS website. The fingerprinting costs aren't on there yet because they haven't persuaded any High St companies to do it yet. So the £30 is the cost they were talking about. The £1000 fine is allowed for in the Identity Cards Act 2006. The £20bn figure is my estimate from the London School of Economics study, the Home Office's own figures, the things the Home Office missed out of their official figures, plus an allowance for the way these projects always massively overrun. I think you'll find the interesting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
llamatron Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8364421.stm More data gets sold to third parties without owners consent. I hope T-Mobile gets a huge fine for this. Data protection laws need a huge strengthening and the technology to store this data needs to be a lot better before the government even thinks about ID cards. link stealer-thought it was T-mobile!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
llamatron Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Why the hell are they charging for it and how can they make that work when people on benefits will never be able to afford that much - as well as people on low incomes? I like the idea of an id card but I do not see that they can charge you for it or charge you if you lose it. So a good idea becomes a money making scheme. However - if the costs are a one off small payment then I have no problem with it. Dragon of Ana Please tell us why you like the idea-noone has given a reason and I just don't see the point??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L00b Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 I'm surprised that you think that any of this is impossible.I don't think. I know (at least for the time being, as of course these things, safety tech vs criminal tech-cracking, are an everlasting race). It's not necessary to physically resemble the owner in order to get a legit fake card, you simply need to present the seemingly correct supporting documents as your own. Birth certificate, utility bill, bank card, etc. At least in France, cannot be done if the person, whose identity criminals are trying to usurp, already has a legit card (would raise a database error/conflict). Moreover, neither ID cards, nor passports or driving licenses are ever posted over there: you must go and get the card at your local Préfecture in person (where you get cross-checked against the document's photo, of course) and if the document is not collected within a short time-frame (about 3 months max), it is destroyed and you must re-apply. So, in that respect, so long as the cards cannot be faked, then yes, it is necessary to resemble the person on the not-fake-but-stolen-or-found-legit card Its unlikely that the everyday person would go to these lengths to forge identity, but there's a lot of money in identity theft and criminals who can afford to pay the right people will always be able to get access either to someone who works with the proprietary tech, or to someone who has cracked it and isn't going public. <...> Criminals spend years obtaining tiny little bits of identity and putting them to one side so that they can gradually build enough to present convincing sets of documents for various identities. There's no question that identity theft is currently one of the fastest-growing aspects of criminal activities. Bear in mind that criminals are first and foremost business people after a good return on investment: so long as it's technically too difficult to bypass, copy or crack tech (therefore correspondingly expensive), they'll fall back on the next available opportunity (type of doc which may not be as "authoritative" as an ID card, therefore provide less opportunities for criminals using same, but which is easier -therefore cheaper- to forge). Note that I didn't say that one should always volunteer all manner of personal information to all and sundry - just what is necessary for whatever purpose, and no more. For ID cards in France: full name, address, DoB, height, current address, a photo and a thumb print. So, save as to the thumbprint, much less information that you would have to give in order to get a new storecard for your local supermarket Anybody done a mortage application lately? I can vouch that my lender and my life insurer have vastly more private/personal data on me (in a single place) than any or all of the EU Governements I have had official dealings with throughout my life, put together. I may not put much faith in the UK Gvt's abilities to safeguard personal data, but I certainly put vastly less faith in private companies' promises not to use my data for commercial gain. See T-Mobile lately, they've been caught, but there's been many before them, and very many others haven't and/or won't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oddgitt Posted November 18, 2009 Share Posted November 18, 2009 Brilliant ID for a criminal, they only have to get one bit of plastic and you're really screwed. What problem is this massively expensive ID card fiasco supposed to solve? If it doesn't solve a well defined problem then I don't want one. Seeing as it would have your biometric data on it I think they'd find it very hard to use it unless they took your eyeballs and fingers too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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