Forget ID cards — tech giants already own our digital souls by AJ Bekker

I find the UK’s outrage over digital ID rather quaint — a little like watching someone panic about electricity while clutching a torch (“Starmer gives green light to digital ID plan”, Report, FT Weekend, September 20; and “In defence of digital ID”, Magazine, Life & Arts, October 4).

In South Africa, we’ve lived with a form of digital ID since the 1970s: one number linking births, deaths, taxes — and the occasional speeding fine. Because of crime, even when visiting a gated estate, you’re asked to hand over your driver’s licence — not out of fear of Big Brother, but because no public system talks to another.

The irony, of course, is that not only Britons but the whole connected world already surrender far more intimate data each day — to Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and soon Palantir, a cheerful oligarchy of digital overseers who not only know what we watch and buy, but predict what will trigger us next. Yet the idea of the state issuing one tidy identifier is treated like Orwell’s second coming.

Perhaps what’s really feared is competence: the notion that government systems might one day work — not ours, alas — as seamlessly as those of the tech giants who already own our digital souls.