So much is based on your identity nowadays –
-your citizenship
-your right to go into a country
-your criminal record
-your credit rating
-your right to get a job (your cv is a kind of identity)
-your rights to insurance
-your rights to healthcare (life and death)
-your salary (are you married or not)
All these things hang on whether you can prove that a number of facts are true about you. E.g. insurance – I am the sort of guy who doesn’t crash his car too readily. The way things are set up today, they also depend on being able to prove “who you are”. This might seem like an obvious thing, but there are serious fundamental problems with it.
Philosophers and sages have been discussing the problem of what is the true identity of a person since we first had them. Until now it has not been a practical problem because if you got arrested by the local police officer and you said – I’m not Bob, the person who committed the crime on day x at place x, even though I look like him, he would just laugh at you and jangle his keys.
Until now, we have been able to rely on an intuitive convention about what an identity is. But things are changing because we are creating worlds where we don’t have an intuition like this. I was looking at a queue of immigrants at Heathrow airport, having massive problems of the “I’m sorry sir but ….” variety, and comparing them with people breezing through the “EU citizens” channel and it struck me that the only difference was that one group was in possession of a certain type of passport with a photo corresponding to how they look and the other was not. If those poor guys who had spent 10 yrs salary getting to the UK only to be turned back had just that one peice of paper, they could just breeze through too.
I was also shocked recently to discover that ANYONE can obtain a copy of any UK citizen’s birth certificate for 7 pounds sterling. There is a famous story of some campaigners against identity cards who got a birth certificate for David Blunkett (blind UK Home affairs minister) and on the basis of that got a driving license in his name. But I actually experienced this first hand – I needed a copy of my full birth certificate and my girlfriend was able to just write to the registry office where I am from and get one for 7 quid – no questions asked. No authorization required.
So what’s my point? My point is that the problem of what an identity really is, is becoming a bit of a pressing issue. Why? Because now our intuitive understanding of identity is gone, but it still has an incredible effect on our life if we are assigned the wrong identity.
So what is an identity in social terms? In functional terms, all the things in the above list don’t require anyone to know “who I am” – that is they don’t need you to know any facts which uniquely identify me among all other individuals. For example to get into the UK, all the customs need to know is that I am a UK citizen. To pay for something all the seller needs to know is that I have put some money in their account. But the way it’s done now is to first find out my name, then look my name up in a database which has all sorts of other irrelevant stuff in it to find out if I have the right credentials to do something.
David Blunkett et al want this way of doing things to be amplified. They want identity cards which first identify me uniquely among all possible individuals using e.g. my fingerprint, photo etc… – and then tell you whether I can take a book out from the library. This is incredibly dangerous for a number of reasons.
1. It means that governments or marketing people can track me wherever I go.
2. It means that I can be asked to trade my personal privacy for a library book. When I tried to say at the airport that I didn’t want to give my entire passenger details and itinerary in order to buy a box of earplugs from Boots, I was told – take it or leave it….
3. It means that if someone CAN fake the means of identification (e.g. a passport), they can have the most incredible powers – to become a citizen of a country – to have access to all kinds of services and information etc… etc…
What is needed is that people start to understand that identity in social/governmental/administrative terms is all about credentials, not about my uniqueness as an individual. So I don’t think I should have to show a phto and a fingerprint to buy a bar of chocolate in Heathrow Duty free, or take a book out of the local library. It should be like the concepts of cash. Cash – as in bank notes performs exactly this function – it doesn’ tell you who I am – it just tells you that I can give you something in return for what you are giving me. No more than that.
You can read a (rather technical) paper I have written about this Here