When the Prime Minister weighs in publicly on a specific policy, it usually generates some comment. When the person commenting is Alec Muffett, it's usually worth taking note. His post this morning is no exception, deftly whipping the cover off two of the 'anomalous messages' we are being offered.
First: as Alec points out, the more consumers use online commercial services such as Amazon, eBay and the like, they more they appreciate that, actually, e-commerce transactions can take place quite satisfactorily on the basis of a small subset of the service-user's identity information... a subset for which a National Identity Register is almost certainly over-kill.
Second: when one tries to promote ID Cards as the cross-sector panacea for authentication, whether for public- or commercial-sector transactions, it gives rise to a serious mismatch which the current policy seems not to address.
Commercial transactions underpinned by commercially-issued credentials take place within a well-understood framework of commercial liability, where contractual responsibilities rule, insofar as they do not try to override non-contractual entitlements ("this guarantee does not affect your statutory rights").
Public-sector transactions underpinned by public-sector credentials take place within a framework (often rather more implicit) of statutory obligations (you can't sue the immigration service for breach of contract if they incorrectly bar you from entering the country...). You may have recourse, but it won't be contractual.
The problem of how you handle cases where these two categories overlap (such as, for instance, using a national ID Card to authenticate yourself when shopping for a mortgage online) is a difficult one to solve. It's especially difficult if you proceed as though the problem doesn't exist.
I'm conscious that in yesterday's post, I referred only to those snippets of the PM's press briefing which they, in turn, quoted. Here's a link to a related BBC article about the general tone of the session, and here's one to the full briefing page on the Downing Street website.
Enticingly, you will see a link there to an online webchat with James Hall, recently drafted in from Accenture to head the ID Cards programme. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the 'submit a question online' process is working. Here's the error I got when I tried:
| Thank you for submitting a question. |
Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a1391'
'wcRS' is undefined
/question.asp, line 76
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Posted by Drew on November 08, 2006 at 09:18 AM GMT+00:00 #
Posted by Dave Walker on November 08, 2006 at 02:56 PM GMT+00:00 #