This is a really unimaginative thread and all everyone ever talks ahout is the Nazis as if it is the final destination of every government given half a chance. This is so tasteless and poisonous to our political discourse I think people should be charged a fiver to mention Nazis when talking about a British political proposal.
But literally no one said the country would be turning into Nazi Germany due to this proposal; it was just an example of a specific point and a very good one at that. The point in itself was that data records such as this can and will be used for bad reasons. Shutting down someone's argument due to this is a perfect example of an Ad Hominem, regardless of how "cliche" you think it is.
Trump has been using ICE much the way like the Gestapo and using data obtained through many sources for those purposes. But calling the USA anything other than a free, western democracy would be apparently equivalent to calling it Nazi Germany? It's not as clear-cut as one or the other; it just so happens that Nazi Germany tended to have many of the same authoritarian ideas when using collected data for harmful purposes. So do China and Russia in their modern-day regimes, and they are anything but Nazi's. They also tended to have a lot of the same rhetoric about protecting people and doing what's best for the nation and its people, etc etc.
It's highly unrealistic to act like anyone against such proposals is imagining that we will be putting swastikas in the street as part of the law's passing, because that is not the case. It does not change the fact that laws like this have a distinct authoritarian echo or potential aspect to them when applied in ways further than the tagline that the government wants people to think it's for.
There is probably about 2 or 3 benefits to a Digital ID against a backdrop of a whole load of potentially harmful and in some cases with extreme consequences cons, it just is not worth it. We couldn't even implement a COVID contact tracing app without burning £37 billion down the drain and even then no one used it, and it had countless issues from the get go which meant it was useless anyway.
As I'm sure you're aware, you've basically described Godwin's Law.
Godwin's law only applies to comments made in glib or lazy manner, not for genuine comparisons to historical facts.
Because you are invoking the Holocaust without due cause to explain how Digital ID is unwelcome. Of course Germany and the Netherlands now habe their own Digital ID scheme and they're probably better placed to learn about totalitarian governments than we are in Britain.
I'm sure the Dutch system is perfect in every way shape or form,
or not
"The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who submitted a third-party intervention before the Court, stressed that the use of SyRI had a discriminatory and stigmatising effect. In the hearing, the state admitted that SyRI had only been used to assess ‘problem districts’. The Court accepted that due to the large amounts of data that qualify for processing and the use of risk profiles ‘there is in fact a risk that SyRI inadvertently creates links based on bias, such as a lower socio-economic status or an immigration background’.No evidence was presented to suggest that safeguards were put in place to neutralise the risk of discriminatory effects.
Or this:
"The home affairs and economic affairs ministries have begun an investigation into the “operational, legal and contractual” consequences of the takeover of the company that runs the Dutch digital identity system by an American tech firm, digitalisation minister Eddy van Marum has told MPs."
“If the Dutch government does something that [US president Donald] Trump does not like, he can turn off our government at the flick of a switch,” broadcaster NOS quotes her as saying. “That is a real danger.”
On the extreme ends in a few places across the world, you have the Indian system which was optional and then made mandatory and
led to people dying of starvation when their ration cards were cancelled due to technical issues or non-posession of the card and / or meeting its requirements.
Enrolment is necessary for filing taxes, opening bank accounts, and benefitting from social welfare programmes; and for some, it’s worked well. But others – notably those who were already struggling with exclusion – have found their troubles to be exacerbated. For example, people who have carried out manual labour for years don’t have fingerprints that can be satisfactorily scanned, and so food rations have been denied as a result. Elderly and disabled people living in rural areas have been unable to walk to where they need to go to verify their identities. In 2018, activists released a list of 25 people who, because of problems with their Aadhaar number in the previous year, were unable to access the food ration owed to them and died of starvation as a result.
Or, China's use of
comparing people's identity cards to their faces as a continuation of the suppression of Uyghur muslims.
"As they pass through one of the thousands of newly built digital media and face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to religious spaces and transportation hubs, the image on their ID is matched to their face."
"As part of this process, in 2016, they began to collect biometric data, such as DNA, high-fidelity voice recordings and face scans, from the entire population of the region in order to track the activities of people on WeChat and in their daily lives using their voice signature and faceprint."
"In order to aid in this assessment process, state authorities also contracted with Chinese private technology firms to develop software programs and hardware that could comb through the images, videos and speech recordings in the WeChat histories of a targeted person in a matter of seconds."
"Through this process, around 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims were determined untrustworthy and scheduled for detention and reeducation in a massive internment camp system."
So no, it is not just 'Nazi Germany' as an argument, there are very real examples of the data being exploited for bad around the world right now. We may not get near anything like China and I hope we don't, but the argument is there nonetheless. You don't give the government a canary in a coal mine of data that could be used for harm, or have a society that relies purely on everyone having an account with the government and their details registered and linked together. The data and system is not inherently bad, but we shouldn't make ourselves more vulnerable when we don't have to to such exploitation.
British people let the OSA get sleepwalked into law only to then realise the true effects of it on the things they care about, but too late that cannot be taken back because this government does not do repeals once made law. It will be the same for this too.
