So you have another bit of plastic with your picture and some fairly innocuous data. At the moment,it appears, nobody even has the equipment to read the data on the card. Big deal.
You will be able to obtain one of these cards soon for£30 if you live in Manchester - of course they are purely voluntary.
Unless you need to go airside at MAN in which case you won’t have to pay £30. Oh and you won’t get airside without one because you need the ID card to get a security pass. Of cause ID cards are voluntary, so long as you don’t need your job.
What is the point of an ID card unless it is compulsory for everyone? No point at all. So when will they (inevitably) become compulsory for all?
What other information will the government eventually demand to put on your voluntary ID card. Who will hold that information - looks like a private sector company, probably a US company.
If that company misuses the information, will they be subject to UK criminal law? It appears not.
Who will have access to that information; they will not tell us but it appears that an awful lot of people will.
Councils and Quangos such as the MCA and are already selling/passing personal information to companies for commercial purposes. The press have moles with access to the national police computer and the DVLA databases plus goodness knows what others. Databases cannot be 100% secure.
This is not just for now. It is for our children and grandchildren. We may have a relatively benign, if incompetent and misguided, government now but who knows who will be in Downing St in twenty years to inherit a Stalinist database of every individual in the country. Your DNA profile may be on it, you may be Jewish..................... Far fetched but not impossible.
Don’t give them the chance.