"Critics argue that the UK is ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’ where more information is collected than what the British society would normally feel comfortable with"

In a world where we already carry our bank cards and travel tickets on our phones, carrying a national digital ID is touted as being the ‘boarding pass to getting on in life’. This is the promise of a national digital ID: a tool stored on your smartphone, allowing you to prove your identity instantly.  

The UK government has set out its idea for how this could work. It wouldn’t be compulsory, but the goal is to make everyday processes smoother, cutting down on what the government sees as unnecessary paperwork and giving people a more control over their own information.

In this episode of Yours Lawfully, produced by qLegal for the TMT Institute, we are joined by Bryn Robinson Morgan, who has spent more than 20 years at the forefront of digital transformation and has experience designing digital identity systems for major organisations such as Mastercard and HSBC. He also advised the UK government on digital identity and privacy.  

In this episode, we explore a simple but important question: what is a national ID? From its basic purpose to how it works in practice, we break down the role it plays in modern society and why governments are increasingly moving toward digital identity systems.