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The Labour government’s favourite Digital ID scheme was hacked

As part of its efforts to sell Digital ID to the public, the UK government has frequently drawn attention to Estonia. People have now highlighted that the Estonian scheme actually suffered one of the issues which critics have warned about:


Estonia and Digital ID

The UK government said the following in a a press release promoting the roll out of Digital ID:

In Estonia, digital ID has revolutionised parents’ lives by enabling access to child benefits, health records and applications for nursery places seamlessly, never having to provide the same information twice.

As reported by the Record in 2021, a hacker breached Estonia’s systems. By exploiting a vulnerability, this hacker was able to download the photos of 286,438 citizens.

The risk of hacking was the third point on Big Brother Watch’s ‘key arguments’ against any such scheme:

While the UK government has said the scheme will prevent ‘shadow economies’ of illegal labour, they also highlighted an already-implemented Digital ID scheme in Estonia. This proved controversial, as Estonia’s shadow economy is more than twice the size of the UK’s:

Graph showing France, Estonia, and other countries have larger shadow economies than the UK

Digital ID isn’t the only sphere in which critics say Keir Starmer’s Labour are creating an opportunity for hackers. As we reported on 20 October, a massive leak of user data from the messaging app Discord was linked to age verification checks which were implemented in response to the Online Safety Act.

Tony Blair and his Tony Blair Institute are key proponents of the scheme. The billionaire Larry Ellison is a key financial supporter of Blair’s, and has also backed it. This has proven controversial as Ellison stands to benefit from the global roll out of Digital ID because he owns the software company Oracle:

Featured image via TUBS (Wikimedia)

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.