Digital ID ushering in a two tier low trust society
Irra Ariella Khi, CEO and co-founder of Zamna, an award-winning AI-driven digital identity company says Kier Starmer is wrong on Digital ID
Irra is a serial entrepreneur. She has built and scaled multiple ventures across the tech sector, raising millions in investment and securing global partnerships. Her recent interview explains the 4 cornerstones of Digital ID…
Keir Starmer is wrong about digital ID. It won’t make life easier, it will make it riskier.
Convenience is easy to promise. Trust, inclusion, and accountability are not, and Britain’s record on digital infrastructure proves it.
I’ve watched more than 300 airlines attempt to roll out digital IDs. Many of these airlines are my clients and colleagues, and I’ve worked at the intersection of identity and borders for more than two decades.
I’ve seen smartphone apps, QR codes, biometric wallets. Most failed. Few were used by more than 2 percent of passengers. Almost all were quietly shelved.
The problem wasn’t the technology. It was scale, inclusivity and trust.
1. Inclusion
Identity, access, and participation should not depend on having a smartphone, a strong signal, or the confidence to navigate yet another app. That isn’t innovation, it’s exclusion.
2. Scale
The UK Government often points to Estonia as the model for digital identity. But Estonia’s entire population (1.6 million) is roughly the size of Croydon. You can’t copy-paste a small national system like that and expect it to work for 67 million people. It’s like taking something designed to run at 100% in Estonia and expecting it to hold up at 4,000% capacity in the UK.
3. Trust and data security
Many people are understandably wary of handing over their most personal data to a government app, especially when there’s no clear fallback if something goes wrong. And it does go wrong. Earlier this year, when Border Force’s ID verification systems failed across UK airports, thousands of passengers were left stranded as electronic gates shut down. The government had to deploy military personnel to manually check passports: a stark reminder that digital systems, however advanced, still need resilient offline, non-digital options.
And, in Vietnam, a new digital ID system linking citizens’ biometric data to their bank accounts led to more than 86 million accounts being frozen or deleted when users failed to verify through the national app. Another reminder that when these systems break, they can take people’s lives and livelihoods down with them.
4. Trust in government itself
Even the best system fails if people don’t trust the institution running it. In the UK, confidence in government technology is still fragile, and for good reason. The government has repeatedly broken our trust. We just have to look at the COVID-19 Track and Trace leak to see what happens when sensitive data isn’t properly protected. Why would anyone hand over more personal data to the same systems that failed to safeguard it before?
A working identity system must be three things: inclusive, resilient, and accountable.
Inclusive means it works for everyone, not just those who are tech-savvy and connected.
Resilient means it functions even when the app fails or the network is down.
Accountable means someone is responsible when it breaks, and that responsibility should not fall on the user or a centralised single-point-of-failure Government who we are meant to blindly trust
Digital ID, as it’s being built today, fails on all three.
Yes, we need to modernise identity. But that doesn’t mean replacing passports and driving licences with an app. It means designing infrastructure that blends digital and physical, secure and human. It means starting from inclusion, privacy, and offline access not treating them as afterthoughts.
Because identity is not just about proving who you are. It’s about belonging. And no one should be locked out of society simply because they don’t have the right phone , or the right level of faith in a government that hasn’t yet earned their trust... and has in fact repeatedly broken it.