Identity Theft Check

Once all the relevant structures are in place and become fully operational, ID cards will be issued as stand-alone documents alongside existing ‘designated documents’ such as passports and visas – although this will not be the only means to get them.

For any foreign national living within the UK, the identity card will also act as a residence permit, residence card and/or registration certificate and will be linked to the National Identity Register (NIR) in the same way as all other British ID cards will be.

As touched upon in the previous article, the scheme will be made secure by the fact that all ID cards will not rely solely on the information printed on the card to prove who you are. The details on your ID card will be checked and confirmed through the Identity Verification Service (IVS) and against your record on the NIR. A fake ID card would be pretty useless if it did not a match your record on the NIR, and faking details that appear on the NIR would be almost impossible without using exceptional sophisticated means..

The government has sought to assure the British population that the whole scheme will not be an invasion of our privacy. The NIR will only hold details of basic Person-Identifying Information (PII) that is already held by various government departments, along with certain other elements of biometric information (like fingerprints and retina scans), and access to this information is very strictly limited by the Identity Cards Act of 2006.

Information will only be held for the purposes of proving identity and nothing else. No sensitive information like medical records will be held, although there will possibly be details of criminal records for certain crimes being held on the database. It remains to be seen what will eventually be included.

Whatever the case, we will all have the right to see what information about us is held on the NIR database.