IPS to become an Identity Wholesaler

The Register reports that from next April, the UK Identity & Passport Service (IPS) will be responsible for tracking every single UK citizen, dead or alive, from birth to grave.

This comes a few days after it was revealed that both ID cards and e-Passports would be issued prompting comments that the United Kingdom has sleep walking into a Big Brother society since 2004.

By centralising all the information that the government has aggregated on one particular individual, this huge database aims at streamlining the process of passport validation and Identity verification, essentially turning into an Identity Server as well as allowing information held on any individual to be updated in quasi real-time.

Richard Thomas, the  Information Commissioner, has repeatedly voiced out his opinion regarding the fact that data collected on individuals could occasionally have devastating effects on their lives.