Robin Wilton's esoterica

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01 Jun · Wed 2005

ID Cards won't stop ID Theft...

In my May 25th post, I promised to revisit the question of why I think the current fad of referring to a UK National ID Card as "a defence against ID theft" is misleading. Recent reports, including this article in the Guardian, have picked up on the following quotation: A recent poll showed that half of people questioned believed ID cards were the best weapon in combating identity theft, which is estimated to cost Britain £1.3bn a year. That's an interesting reflection of public perception, but not a convincing argument for a national ID card. Three forms of ID Theft I have had categorised for me recently, by an authority on the subject, are:

- Mass data compromise
- Credit card fraud
- 'Classic' Identity Theft

The last of these is the case where an attacker gathers enough information about their victim to be able to transact instead of them. Those are the headline cases of "Man has credit refused, discovers he has £48,000 of (someone else's debt". Credit card fraud might be cases of individual theft of cards and PINs, or it might result from mass data compromise. Mass data compromise is the other typical 'headline' ID theft - where an organisation loses hundreds of sets of customer data, including payment details, and these are fraudulently exploited. That data compromise might be electronic or physical... you have probably seen "Theft of laptop exposes thousands of customer accounts" stories. These are indeed the kinds of ID Theft the public express concerns about. But preventing them does not require a National ID card. It might be a good argument for including biometrics in bank-issued cards, but to date the UK banks, at least, seem to be of the view that Chip and PIN is the appropriate response. What it comes down to is this: saying that "ID Cards are good for citizens because they will guard against ID Theft" responds to a popularly-perceived threat: but if the specific kind of ID Theft in question is actually benefit fraud, then the bottom line is that the resulting payback to any given citizen is extremely remote. In fact, on some calculations I would have to pay far more for the compulsory card than I could ever hope to see in the form of a 'prevented benefit fraud' tax rebate. Then there's the question of whether ID Cards would save more in benefit fraud than they would cost to operate. But as long as the Home Office refuses (on grounds of commercial confidentiality) to say what the system will cost, we won't know, will we?

Posted by racingsnake @ 04:57 PM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [1] ]

Comments:

Isn't the "crime" suffered by the victim of ID theft actually libel?

Posted by William on June 18, 2005 at 01:49 PM GMT+00:00 #

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