Today I answer the commentary published in a previous post (in Spanish – here is the English version).
The comment says that in Spain, normal people in the street it see the National Identity Card (DNI for short) as something normal, that does not attempt against our rights, but as the most natural and simple way to identify oneself, and that Spanish people find it quite annoying to need to provide a utility bill to identify oneself in places like the video store, because there is no ID system in Britain. It is true that we see the ID card as something normal. I did see it as such until I found out, thanks to an essay I did for University, about the use of an ID number in the combination of data bases. For some reason the server I uploaded this piece of work to is down; as soon as I can access it, I will put it on a comment on this blog.
Utility bills are not just used for identification purposes for services like video rental or banking – it is also a way to know that you are solvent enough. You would not have an electricity bill if you did not have a good credit record. Moreover, with the amount of times one person moves on average, specially if you rent, a bill is a much more updated proof of your address that an identity card. And this is very important in case they must take you to court for non-payment. Of course you can go off leaving your debts behind and hope you’ll get away with it, but it will be a lot easier to track you down if they have your last address than if they have just the address that appears on an ID card that may be 5 or 10 years old.
Until now, in outlets like the video rental, the bank, your job… – you are leaving your data, that you trust will be kept confidential. In theory, these companies are not going to sell your data to anybody for junk mail purposes, for instance. In reality, there are companies that do sell these data, when it is profitable to do so. It is profitable when the generated profit is correctly proportional to the effort to get and manage it, i.e. when it is easy. And it is easy to sell the data bases when it is easy to combine them with other data bases to form giant data bases.
And here it is where the identity card scheme, which is being developed in GB and which apparently is second to none, comes into place… because it about allocating a unique and non-transferable number to each person. That number, being unique, makes the combination of data bases possible, where before it was not.
In the essay that I have been working on before I mention the issue of ‘having nothing to hide’, but I can now advance that we all should be scared of a project like this. Companies gather our data, which they consider their private property (note: companies are now considering that ‘your’ data are ‘their’ property) and transfer and sell them to each other, to make their data bases bigger and bigger (heard of Echelon?). Some of those data have been typed by not too well paid ‘dates entry clerks’. There is a possibility that your data are erroneous. This has been verified, for example, when very old – or very young – men have been called up to military service, in Spain… We people do not have access to those data, and of course we do not have possibility of correcting them if they are wrong.
In a society where our relationships with the authorities or companies that provide us with primary services like water, electricity or communication, are based on these data bases compiled with data that the user/citizen/client cannot correct if they are wrong, we encounter situations where people are denied basic services because of an error which they cannot correct themselves. And if this goes on, we will find that people are accused of crimes on the basis of these data, and then it will be the word of the citizen against the codified data of the authorities, to which such citizen does not even has access.
Confronted to this, the only possibility that the average citizen has at hand is to refuse to facilitate their data, or in the case of the UK, to refuse to have an ID scheme whose real purpose is the construction of a national database designed for the individual and collective control of whole economic and ethnic communities.
