BCCLA Workshop: The BC Services Card: A National ID Card by Stealth?

Co-presented by BC Civil Liberties Association and SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

This half-day workshop gathered internationally renowned experts and advocates in privacy, surveillance and computer security, as well as government and industry representatives, to publicly discuss and debate these pressing issues. It was also the launch of the BCCLA’s report on the BC Services Card.

For the last several years, the B.C. government has been developing the technical infrastructure and legal framework for a comprehensive identity card system. This Februrary, it introduced the BC Services Card, a mandatory provincial ID card that replaces the old health CareCard and allows for the layering of a range of government services, beginning with the driver’s licence. Significantly, the card represents unprecedented changes in the way the government collects, accesses and shares personal information—including highly sensitive health information—amongst departments, agencies and even private contractors.

The card is just part of BC’s wide-ranging vision for integrated identity information management—a vision that scales and interoperates on a federal level. In addition to the well known risk of security breaches associated with such ID systems, privacy-related questions loom large.

What is the capacity for this new data-linking scheme to enable government to profile and track its citizens across a range of government services via thousands of data portals, accessible by untold numbers of users?

As a public-private partnership, how will the card program resist the monetization of personal information?

Is this indeed a prelude to a national ID card? What are the implications for democracy in the era of Government 2.0?