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"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.

In this episode of IdentiTea, we get into the gritty brew of wallet wars - who’s building them, who should own them, and why they’re suddenly the hottest battlefield in digital identity. From Yorkshire tea scandals to African micro-data economies, this is a globe-trotting, regulation-poking, UX-grumbling journey into the future of personhood.

Nick chats with Bryn Robinson-Morgan, a seasoned expert in digital transformation, about the collision of governments and Big Tech, user experience as a form of privilege, and whether wallets will become our new digital selves. They dig into the push-pull between inclusion and infrastructure, public and private control, and the philosophical implications of proving you’re a person in a platform-first world.

Expect witty banter, real insights, and the occasional Black Mirror reference, because when your AI starts doing your identity proofing for you, things get weird…