Gordon Brown Would Share ID Info With Businesses

Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.

Far from intending to dump ID cards once he is in Downing Street, Brown is quietly studying how biometric technology - identifying people by unique markers such as fingerprints and iris patterns - could be expanded over the next 20 years to fight crime.

Police could be alerted instantly when a wanted person used a cash machine or supermarket loyalty card. Cars could be fingerprint-activated, making driving bans much harder to disobey.

The plan would make the ID cards scheme cheaper, since companies would pay for access to the national identity register - a government database of biometric information being compiled for the ID cards programme. Brown's plans belie reports that the Treasury, concerned about the cost of ID cards, would ditch them when he became Prime Minister. 'It's almost the opposite - Gordon's thinking about ID cards is that it's part of the answer but there's a much wider picture,' said a source close to him.

Most of the components of what's being run up the flagpole now have already been suggested by mad wonks, with reference to the Home Office ID project. Future generations of cashpoints and point of sale equipment, they've told us, could cater for biometrics and ID cards, and the widespread use of ID checks in association with financial transactions would combat identity fraud (or credit card theft, as we used to call it before we needed to fiddle the identity fraud figures). People would find themselves (happily, not grudgingly, in this deranged scenario) using their ID card several times a day, and all of those lovely ID checks of the National Identity Register would provide the Government with revenue, and detailed records of everybody's financial transactions and whereabouts ...

...Aside from the obvious technical issues, there's the problem of convincing businesses - what's in it for them? Identity fraud, the Government keeps telling us, is a major concern (but apparently not major enough to warrant the Government measuring it properly) and needs to be fought. Banks, credit card companies and major retailers however aren't automatically going to line up behind 'rock solid ID' at any cost, and nor will their customers. Yes, ID fraud is a cost to business and an inconvenience for the victims, but the costs are bearable, and the more security you have in a system, the more inconvenient it's likely to become. So there's a pretty strong argument that businesses think that they've got just about the right level of security now, and that they can keep losses within boundaries and absorb them as a cost of business. If an ID check at POS didn't take any time and was 100 per cent reliable and didn't require new hardware investment and cost virtually nothing, then maybe they'd see it as useful. Otherwise?

In addition to this, businesses aren't likely to want to trust the accuracy, reliability and security of Government systems. The banks and credit card companies have run customer databases for years, generally fairly effectively and with relatively few security breaches. More recently the supermarkets have got fairly cute at running loyalty schemes, and while these can be vaguely sinister, they're voluntary, and there are limits to what the supermarkets can do with them without triggering massive PR disasters. Government, on the other hand, has shown itself incapable of getting absentee parents to pay for their children's upkeep, while Gordon Brown's own department is the one that gives away money on the Internet after massive ID theft from a Government department. Really, no sensible business that knows what it's doing as regards networks and personal data is going to want to play with these people unless the law forces it to.