KawaiiPunk Well that's it. No COVID test for me.
p.s. I'm fine. Just need to visit folks who are vulnerable.
This is despite entering:
name
dob
address
phone number
NHS number
national insurance number
@kawaiipunk Obviously, gov agencies and commercial enterprises still need to uniquely identify citizens.
But because there's no single unique citizen id, everyone needs to submit the whole ridiculous set of details which you have just enumerated, and more, for the organisation to be able to match it through their records.
So instead of name, surname, national id number you need to reveal name, surname plus tons of sensitive data to every agency. Because, you guess it, "I'm not a number..." 😂
Precisely, and the amount of magic and effort the gov programmers need to put into cross-matching these is just incredible. Because each agency obviously keep them in different format, sematics etc. Tons of honest, very creative... and completely unnecessary work. So each time you get a cryptic error when applying for something on gov.uk, say thanks to those whose lobbying won in 2011
Well, at the end of the day we ended up with more authoritarian and more personal data in private companies 😀
@vfrmedia
AFAIK there was (and still is) nothing preventing govt quietly building the citizens database anyway (which is what appears to now be being done for the Police as well as adding police-related records to it!)
Although ID cards are unpopular, it had already reached the stage that a young adult got carded everywhere if trying to buy alcohol or enter entertainment premises at night, so most just got provisional driving licence photocards (even if they didn't drive yet) >>
OTOH the DVLA/DVSA tend to get things mostly right (at least nowadays) and have decades of experience of doing so.
A bigger problem is rampant privatisation and outsourcing of Govt IT services in the 2000s, which further fragmented how IT systems were deployed in the public sector and prevented departments fully working together for a few years (since 2010 onwards there seems to be attempts to address that, but they are of course regaining lost ground)
@kravietz @kawaiipunk
when you want to view/change info for your driving licence, DVLA appears to validate info with DWP and the Passport Office but of course all those links to the different databases have to be functional for the validation to succeed...