New Zealand ID?

[Marmoot]

Just curious, you don't have any compulsory ID card for NewZealanders, do you?

Now, if you do not go overseas, you don't have passport. And if you don't drive, you wouldn't have drivers license. If you want to check in to a hotel and they ask for ID, what would you give them?

Better yet, if you want to open a bank account, what ID can you give?

And, if you want to open a mortgage, is it possible at all?

[wkid_one]

JP Verified Birth Cert is the next best option if you don't have photo ID. This will get you a bank account/home loan.

[matthewt]

Yer it's weird we don't. People have resisted because of over-hyped big brother fears. A lot of govt agencies and private institutions already datamatch for a number of reasons which is done with our consent and within the Privacy act. Has anyone ever read the fineprint in all sorts of finance/insurance/govt contracts ??

I wrote the application code for a large system that needed to match data with 100's of external vendors (provided a data-matching agreement is in place of course). Not having a uniform ID for people proved to be a major nightmare. The difference in people names stored in different computer systems is quite interesting. To the point where we had to allow for multiple aliases to be setup for people so that when we sent out a request it had the name the vendor expected which might not be the name we had on file (which was verified with a birth certificate or passport).

I lived in Singapore for nearly 3 years and they have had a national ID card for years, just has name, ID# and photo. I think they start from age 16 (probably when they kids do national service). Because of this I had to carry my passport around because a lot of the places I went for business required the ID card to be left at the security counter. My work visa had no photo so I had to leave my passport there. Took me a while to get used to that.

As for ID internally, my inlaws came to visit us in Singapore. My wifes mother had never been on a place/train/boat in her life (no really she hadn't!!). So they had to get certified copies of their birth certificates to get a passport. Hotels usually rely on a credit card because at the end of the day all they want is to get paid. I think it would be fairly rare not to have a drivers license nowdays.

A friend of mine got pulled over about 10 years ago for a random check (had a boy racer car so got pulled over a lot), it turns out someone with the same name and approx the same age had an arrest warrent out on them. At the time you didn't have to carry your drivers license on you so he spent 30 minutes on the road side why they verified exactly who he was/wasn't.

NZ will get a national ID card it's really just an matter of time.

[pete376403]

Singapore card has a lot more than id#, photo and name. But its all in a machine readable barcode

[James Deuce]

NZ will get a national ID card it's really just an matter of time.

Not if I've got anything to do with it, and it is an issue I'd die for. That sort of attitude will have people disappearing in the middle of the night, and no one asking questions.

[MacD]

which is done with our consent and within the Privacy act.

Do you really think you have any choice but to give consent in most of these situations? Generally it's a case of no consent, no service/product. No coercion in that of course...no sireee

Personally, I think its great that you had so much difficulty data-matching!

[MikeL]

NZ will get a national ID card it's really just an matter of time.

And we will accept it because it will all be made to sound so reasonable. For several years in the 1970s I lived in France where everyone had to not just have, but carry on them, a national identity card. It was also a legal requirement that if you moved house you had to report within so many days to the nearest police station to officially update your details. At the time English people and NZers were appalled by this bureaucratic intrusion but the French just shrugged their shoulders, grumbled about it but got on with living their lives in the slightly anarchic sort of way that managed to preserve the maximum of individual freedoms. But those were more innocent times...

Around the same time in N.Z. there were attempts from time to time to make it mandatory to carry your driver's licence on you when driving, but these were always knocked back on the grounds that this was a free society, not a totalitarian state. It would be the thin end of the wedge, we used to say.
Well, the wedge is getting thicker. 9/11 and subsequent events have been an opportune pretext that western governments generally have found irresistible. Watch this space.

[pete376403]

Something on the toob the other night about a national ID card being introduced in Britain. They're are just trying to find the right personal identifier (fingerprint, retinal scan, etc) before its introduced wholesale. Gattica here we come.
BTW, ever looked at what the US Patriot Act allows the feds to do in the USA - now that is really scary

[sAsLEX]

Do you really think you have any choice but to give consent in most of these situations? Generally it's a case of no consent, no service/product. No coercion in that of course...no sireee

Personally, I think its great that you had so much difficulty data-matching!

More in that if you dont find out about what they have done then it couldn't of happened ,they can do alot of things and you will never know!

[Lou Girardin]

When it comes, the great unwashed will say "if you've done nothing wrong, you don't have to worry".
That particular rational has lost us a lot of rights.

[Ms Piggy]

Well I think they're definitely in the process of bringing in a National I.D card. I work for Internal Affairs and you no longer need a full birth cert (if born in N.Z) or marriage cert (if married here) b/c we have a new system whereby those details can be verified though our data base. Makes it easier and is kinda logical b/c Internal Affairs look after Births, Deaths & Marriages, N.Z Citizenship and N.Z Passports.

Although that could all get a lot stricter now with these forged passports turning up!

[jrandom]

And we will accept it because it will all be made to sound so reasonable ... the wedge is getting thicker.

At this rate, it won't be long until there are dour uniformed men at regular intervals in our daily lives, asking "Your papers, please".

Still, we've got it a HELL of a lot better here than the way things are getting over in Fortress USA. I do hope we don't follow their lead.

And yes, the real problem is that none of these measures do ANYTHING in real terms to help 'security'. They just give the government more control over the sheep-like law-abiding citizens. I don't generally bother with being a 'civil liberties' nut; it's just that it's so obvious what the motivations are behind this stuff.

Or maybe the people designing the systems really are just stunningly *thick* and believe their own rhetoric. I'm not entirely sure.

[matthewt]

Do you really think you have any choice but to give consent in most of these situations? Generally it's a case of no consent, no service/product. No coercion in that of course...no sireee

Of course you have a choice. If you don't want you credit details everywhere then do it the old fashion way and save money first. But my point was that the vast majority of people never read the fine print, they just sign away.

Personally, I think its great that you had so much difficulty data-matching!

Well, it probably didn't take a great deal of extra work, it just made it for problems when it came time to actually match with the external parties. In my case the people we were matching recieved assistence from us rather than getting any sort of penatly. But because of the matching process a number of people would of been under extreme hardship due to delays in finding all their details in time.

The real problem here is not data matching, it's the controls around what is matched and for what reasons.

Do you really think without a national ID card you're any more hidden than with one ??

[matthewt]

Not if I've got anything to do with it, and it is an issue I'd die for. That sort of attitude will have people disappearing in the middle of the night, and no one asking questions.

That sort of thing already happens now. Again this comes back to who is allowed to match and for what reason. You're right though, there are people in certain positions that would have access to the info and not care about the privacy act.

Just look at how the US is going with it's "Patriot" act.

[matthewt]

BTW, ever looked at what the US Patriot Act allows the feds to do in the USA - now that is really scary

I looked at that at a US civil liberties site a few months ago, man they rushed that puppy through and now people are only just starting to realise what they have actually lost. A lot of it was pitched at helping "keep the US safe" but there have already been a number of cases where the Patriot act has been used to solve internal crimes.