Arguments against National ID

[UnderAGreySky]

Here in India they've launched a National ID scheme called "Universal ID" (UID) or Aadhar. My parents want me to get one done. I already have a passport but this thing involves giving the government fingerprint scan and retinal scans. They are convinced that it will be useful especially since I won't be in India for most of the near future, they deem it useful for doing bank work on my behalf or paying a bill or two.

Now, gut feeling and vague memories tell me that a national ID is a bad, bad thing and anyway I'm queasy about giving over my eyeball scans to the government. Am I being paranoid and are my parents right? Any way I can convince them that I'm right? I'm open to all arguments.

[K. A. Pital]

A letter of attorney with broadest powers would solve the issue and wouldn't require giving fingerprints and/or retinal scans to the government.

[PeZook]

Wha...retinal scans? Fingerprints?

Man...why do they even need that?

Poland has had a national ID since WWII, and it's never been a big deal. It's actually pretty useful for proving your identity/verifying the identity of someone (like, say, dumbass customers who lose their confirmation slips and come to pick up their laptops...) - but they're just photo ID cards.

It's not like businesses will have fingerprint and retina scanners, so why the fuck do they even need biometric IDs?

[Mr Bean]

It's not like businesses will have fingerprint and retina scanners, so why the fuck do they even need biometric IDs?

Fingerprints is step 1 in any criminal investigation because of how hard it is to avoid leaving fingerprints unless you planned your crime and lots of crimes are done by the dumb kids and crimes of passion demographic. As for retinal scans that's just planning into the future when hand held eye scanners will become economical.

Nation wide ID's are useful, I wish America had real ones rather than the mess we have now where we use social ID cards, Drivers licenses and Veteran ID's and sixteen other methods of photo ID to identify yourself. When I was younger I opposed photo ID's as being to privacy intrusive, but in the two decades since then all privacy has since quality died as every company and the government already collects far more information than most people suspect on everyone.

[Purple]

Retinals scans are both strange and useless if you ask me. What would be more useful would be DNA samples. And not only in the catching criminals part. Seriously, imagine an aircraft crash or road accident. Would it not be useful for the state to have a ready made database of samples to compare your charred and mangled cadaver to?

[Zaune]

The main argument against it here in the UK is function creep. The theory goes that at first signing up for it will be voluntary, but then the government will decide to make it mandatory for everyone because it vastly simplifies tasks like applying for certain benefits. Then there'll be some sort of terrorist scare and we'll have to present the things every time we enter certain government buildings, or else there'll be some other moral panic and they'll introduce on-the-spot fines for not being able to produce it when the police ask your name... And the next thing we knew, we'd end up with internal passports and vehicle checkpoints and all sorts of totalitarian unpleasantness.

I would not honestly have put this past New Labour, actually.

[PeZook]

Well, Poland had all that and now we don't, so function creep is entirely reversible.

And we didn't have to hold a civil war about it, either

[Zaune]

Well, Poland had all that and now we don't, so function creep is entirely reversible.

And we didn't have to hold a civil war about it, either

True enough, but personally I'd rather avoid letting things get to that point in the first place.

Besides, we'd only end up outsourcing the task to the lowest bidder and getting a system that cost three times as much as promised and was full of massive security holes.

[Jaepheth]

Retinal and fingerprint scans would be helpful to you and your embassy if you're ever stuck in a foreign country and have lost your passport.

It is a bit creepy to have such personal data sitting in a database though, and if ever in the future, for any reason, you find yourself an enemy of the state it'd come back to bite you.

Like everything in life; there are pros and cons.

[UnderAGreySky]

To be honest, nothing I read here is convincing me to *not* get the ID done, which surprises me. Guess I'll sign up tomorrow.

[D.Turtle]

Frankly, I don't think there is anything sinister about a national ID. Nowadays people freely give up WAY more extremely personal information than could ever be gathered through a national ID. Instead, a national ID allows a government to do lots of very useful things, with less effort and cost.

[Stark]

In many countries a drivers licence is basically 'state ID' anyway, or national ID if your country has consistent licensing. Renting a house is a far greater invasion of privacy.

[Simon_Jester]

The national ID card isn't really a problem in a sane country. Poland's memories of secret police are recent enough, and their pathological security-fears weak enough, that it sounds like they're pretty sane on this issue. Other countries like Australia maybe too.

Britain? The US? I'm not so sure. No idea where India lies on that scale.

Retinal and fingerprint scans would be helpful to you and your embassy if you're ever stuck in a foreign country and have lost your passport.

It is a bit creepy to have such personal data sitting in a database though, and if ever in the future, for any reason, you find yourself an enemy of the state it'd come back to bite you.

Like everything in life; there are pros and cons.

Or the state sees something on your Facebook page that puts you on a watch list. Or they're using an algorithm to identify people that "need watching" which is, say, about as reliable as the ones people use for targeted advertisements. If software can decide that this forum needs evangelical Christian banner ads at the bottom for people reading the Salvation War,* software can decide you're a maybe-terrorist for writing something like "Waiting three hours in line blows. Up to now I had time for that, but I have to get to the airport."

That's my pet worry. It used to be you needed a huge network of informants for the state to be able to keep track of everything you said and spot suspicious characters by trawling for random, careless one-liners that might indicate disloyalty or disaffection. Nowadays, do you really need anything Google hasn't already got? Sure, you'd get a ton of false alarms, but you can always use more low-paid goons to chase them all down; it's a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of budget people are willing to spend in the WAR ON TERROR.

Not that national ID cards really change whether or not this can happen.
______________

*Yeah, who reads that, fine, but I remember when I did read it and those ads popped up...

[Broomstick]

Retinals scans are both strange and useless if you ask me. What would be more useful would be DNA samples. And not only in the catching criminals part. Seriously, imagine an aircraft crash or road accident. Would it not be useful for the state to have a ready made database of samples to compare your charred and mangled cadaver to?

Well, yes, DNA is definitive... unless you're an identical twin (or triplet, which also occur) in which case it's not unique to you.

That, and charring sort of screws up the DNA enough that good dental records might be a better means of identification.

[Simon_Jester]

If you can narrow down something to identical twins, you can identify which twin in almost all non-fictional cases. The other twin will still be alive, have an alibi, whatever.

[Formless]

Well, yes, DNA is definitive... unless you're an identical twin (or triplet, which also occur) in which case it's not unique to you.

If you can narrow down something to identical twins, you can identify which twin in almost all non-fictional cases. The other twin will still be alive, have an alibi, whatever.

That's great, unless you are a chimera.

Sometimes nature is weirder than fiction.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, yes. Noted.

Although those are so rare they're... what, about as common as quadruplets? Quintuplets?

[Broomstick]

No one knows how common chimeras are. They are assumed be rare, but it's only recently we've been able to detect them. They might be as common as fraternal twins... or they may not.

[Formless]

That's right, in fact they may be quite common. (check citation #11-- its a downloadable PDF so I won't link to it directly) You know, on the scale of "rare genetic anomalies" at any rate.

[Bedlam]

It also depends what you actually store on the database DNA wise.

Its not practical to store a persons whole sequence at the moment so you normally record a certain number of allieles generally microsatellites or SNPs. How unique the record is depends on how many markers are recorded and how variable they are. It can be hard to truely tell how variable a marker is as you can't check the whole population you have to take a sample and then estimate from that.

So a sequence of markers may suggest that there is a 1 in 5 billion chance of a match at random but that doesn't nessecily mean that there arn't 3-4 people in the same family with these exact markers or that as you based your calculation on a sample from your own countries population that in a country on the other side of the planet the chance of a match isn't 1 to 10 thousand.

[Purple]

Well you can newer be certain sure. But it's way better than having no data at all to compare. All the cases you mentioned are either a) strange genetic anomalies, b) cases where very few methods would work at all or c) situations where multiple close members of the same family are dead and you don't really care who is who.

[Broomstick]

Well you can newer be certain sure. But it's way better than having no data at all to compare. All the cases you mentioned are either a) strange genetic anomalies

Identical twins are not "strange genetic anomalies" to most people. From the stats regarding identical twin births that I've been able to find, it seems 6 in every thousand people are identical twins which is a fairly high rate for a "genetic anomaly". In absolute numbers that adds up to a couple million people world-wide. Chimeras might be just as common, perhaps more, perhaps less.

b) cases where very few methods would work at all

Fingerprints, retinal prints, and dental records are actually more unique than DNA, as all of those methods can be used to properly identify identical twins and chimeras. Two of those methods have been around several generations.

c) situations where multiple close members of the same family are dead and you don't really care who is who.

Who died first can have significant implications in inheritance law and insurance payouts. These may not be trivial.

Also, in the case of crime, establishing who, exactly was where doing what is essential in establishing alibis. The US recently had a case where the wrong twin was sent to jail - I'm trying to find a print article on it as I heard it on the TV - so contrary to your assertion that such concerns don't apply to the real world such things do, in fact, occur.

[Broomstick]

Oh, here we go, it seems there's more than one instance:

Wrong twin in jail for Chandler murder?

Signal Mountain man mistakenly arrested and sent to jail for twin brother's crime

[Purple]

I think you sort of missed one very important part of my argument. I newer, ever denied that DNA is infallible. And I definitively do not claim the TV like magical DNA rubbish. All I am saying that on general it is more useful than not. And all the numbers you provided support that.

[K. A. Pital]

I guess the decision to do it or not depends on whether you envision your future life as that of a loyal citizen for its entire duration, or allow the possibility of you facing the state machine as an opponent if not an open foe. In the first case, IDs wouldn't be harming you at all. In the second, you wouldn't want them to have such stuff.