I do not feel that reporting every online interaction I have with my government in the UK, back to a huge corporate in the US, is in any way appropriate. But I can't even get anyone to engage on the issue.
When I tried to raise it I got directed to a helpdesk ticket on a site run by an SV helpdesk-as-a-service company.
I appreciate that gov.uk have done some great stuff getting the UK government online, and their designs and Open Source attitude are refreshing, but this is a a serious privacy issue.
GDS’s GA Premium account contractually prevents Google from investigating the data, and Google self-anonymises with a flag in their API[1]. If you don’t trust them then that’s fine, but for functionality vs cost it seems to be the best option.
For what it’s worth, for extremely sensitive projects like GOV.UK Verify other options are fine; Verify uses a local Piwik instance.
You’re also welcome to block that specific JS or just turn off JS completely on GOV.UK properties - everything has to work without JS to go live on GOV.UK.[2]
It's not about you trusting somebody to handle the data. It's just that the data should not exist at all outside of you and the gov.
As soon as the data exists somewhere else, there is a way to misuse it and a chance it will happen. In todays word, those don't even require a lot of imagination to find because it already happened and is currently happening.
At what point is it, though? From the Client or when it hits the server. If it is the later, we can’t know if three letter agencies intercept the traffic before it gets anonymized.
Furthermore, it is often possible to de-anonymize data especially if you have an extensive knowledge of users and their data such as google. But even then, you can also de-anonymize data
The client can’t anonymise the IP as it connects to the Google server which then will implicitly know it. What the flag does is tell the server to anonymise it from that point onwards. From my original link:
When a customer of Analytics requests IP address anonymization, Analytics anonymizes the address as soon as technically feasible at the earliest possible stage of the collection network. The IP anonymization feature in Analytics sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros in memory shortly after being sent to the Analytics Collection Network. The full IP address is never written to disk in this case.
I still can't believe people are happy using Verify.
I very reluctantly tried to use it as I don't want to give all my data to any of the companies you listed, and yet it failed to identify me using the two companies I was allowed to pick.
I really don't see how it's acceptable to force users to give so much personal data to a handful of randomly selected private companies, on the off-chance that they already have it.
I'm in a similar situation to you. Last time I tried to verify my identity, two of the companies refused to do so because I don't have a full driving license, only provisional; and the other two didn't require a driving license but refused to accept that I exist, naturally without telling me what I should do about it.
The concerning part was what happened when I tried to cancel the process. The companies told me that they would delete all the data I had submitted to them, but when I tried again a year later, I was invited to resume my application, and all my data was still in their systems!
[edit] Just tried to go through the process again to see if anything has changed. I picked Royal Mail as an identity provider but was unable to finish because I had to upload a scan of a phone contract, which I don't have since I use pay as you go! Bloody waste of time!
>> GDS’s GA Premium account contractually prevents Google from investigating the data
And we all know that means it's safe forever, and isn't in any sort of jeopardy the moment it crosses a border, or in fact the moment it escapes to a third party at all.
It's all industry standard so it must be fine!
>> For what it’s worth, for extremely sensitive projects like GOV.UK Verify other options are fine; Verify uses a local Piwik instance.
Then gov.uk should use a local Piwik instance for everything, GDS are clearly not incapable of it.
FYI I can and do block google analytics JS. It shouldn't be there in the first place, I shouldn't have to block it when interacting with my own government.
Are you at GDS? Please can you tell your friends at HMRC that the login system is the most janky UX I've ever experienced and is prone to social engineering due to how complex it is.
Totally agreed. After I lost my login details to sign into HMRC portal to do my self assessment, it was almost impossible to recover my credentials.
Impossible over the phone as they wanted to send a paper letter to my address and I was just moving to a new place (and doing some travel before that) so I had no more access to the address HMRC had on file.
I finally gave up and just asked my accountant to do it on my behalf. He somehow managed to sort this out with HMRC.
There is no flow to recover your username and password (or generate new one) with your email address which is maddening.
> GDS’s GA Premium account contractually prevents Google from investigating the data
What's the penalty for completely disregarding that?
Is it anywhere near large enough to justify them not disregarding it?
More to the point: Pretty much the only thing a contract can do is impose a monetary penalty. Even if it's quite large, it's still only money, and Google rakes in money by the bushel basket from selling data to advertisers. Therefore, it isn't a very convincing penalty.
in this specific case they would be messing with the UK government on a controversial topic in the public view... the contractual penalty would be the least of their worries
Right, but those companies don’t know what services people are trying to use Verify for (in the same way that the services don’t know which identity provider you used). The part of Verify that uses Piwik is the hub in the middle that brokers the identity flow.
But you still have to give the Verify companies enough data that a breach of their systems would be very serious. Eg. If the Post Office (an organisation that recently falsely sent a load of employees to prison due to their own cocked up IT project) gets hacked, they have (or could have) dates of birth, 6 years of addresses, email addresses, etc. of a good number of gov.uk users.
You don’t give the majority of those details to the Post Office (or other providers), they ask you questions about the data they already hold on you. The passport and driving licence information is checked via APIs provided from the government to accredited companies, and the system is designed such that that data isn’t stored by the identity providers (beyond a flag to say that that form of identity has been verified).
Well that's the point of making it open source. So you can point that out. I just hope people will finally get than opening is just half of the work, the other half is actually properly interacting with people crossing the door you just opened.
I went through a visa application process for the UK over the past few months. The main gov.uk site is a very good website for finding information, well designed, works on mobile, etc. Coming from the US, that was quite refreshing -- there's no equivalent in the US as everything is scattered across 100 different agency websites in 50 states.
However the "business logic" of gov.uk is still sorely lacking. For the actual visa application process and payment, I was bounced around between 4-5 different third party websites handling different aspects of the process. I'm sure further integration with gov.uk is on the roadmap, and it will certainly be nice.
As a new resident of the U.K., though, I have to admit I've been pleasantly surprised and very happy with the gov.uk website so far.
Canada's is same way. I am from India, and been in US for about half a decade. US's process is completely old school.
Canada had plans to integrate all citizen services through one account dashboard, curious to see how countries roll-out services like those in next decade or so.
There is actually a legal requirement for banks to offer no-credit no-fee accounts, in order to help people get into the banking system and take advantage of the associated discounts, but obviously they don't advertise it much.
I lived in England for about a year in 2009 - 2010 and I never had a bank account there. I was willing to open one, but a law (which probably existed to prevent fraud and laundering) made it very hard to do so without proof of permanent residence in the UK, which I did not have. Eventually I decided it was easier for me to upgrade my French Mastercard to the Gold level, where I had no extra fees when withdrawing or paying in pounds (nowadays I think you need Platinum for that).
As a French national you would only need 2 things to open a UK bank account: your French passport and some kind of document that shows you have a UK address.
Proof of address used to be easy as any utility bill would do, but now days it's trickier because so much is done online and paper bills don't get sent out much any more! And, of course, it's a problem if the bills at your house are in someone else's name. (They won't accept print outs from the Internet for obvious reasons...)
However, if you're registered for paying tax in the UK then you would certainly have a letter from Jobcentre Plus or HMRC showing your address. This would be accepted by your bank.
Another option is to get a UK driver's license, which is pretty easy and inexpensive if you already have a driver's license from your (EU) home country.
Not accepting printouts is ridiculous. It's trivial to fake a letter.
I had a similar issue when I was opening a bank account a while ago. I didn't actually get any bills in the mail, so I printed off my ISP bill, which was a pdf of what they send you in the mail. Obviously, the printer didn't fold it to fit in an envelope.
The person at the bank asked if it was a printout or actually from the mail since it didn't have any creases in it, they said they could only accept it if it was from the mail.
I told them I would just walk outside, fold it up, and walk back in, it was exactly the same as what you'd get in the mail. They ended up accepting it, even though technically they weren't meant to.
It's ridiculous, I don't actually physically receive mail from anything. All my bills etc. are done electronically, I even sign contracts electronically.
Good point - I wonder how many of those millions are non-permanent residents. The ID requirements are onerous, and like most countries it's easy to get stuck in a cyclic dependency loop of paperwork.
Every interaction I have with a gov.uk portal is a painful UX disater - most recently passport and driver license, both had a submitting payment stage. I can't imagine anyone saying 'wow look how at the gov.uk got it right' lets use their code, a glorified CMS system with forms and payments bolted on - badly - so badly.
Just rechecked it's still complete crap. They can't support the back button, no post / redirect pattern, confirm form resubmission. https://passportapplication.service.gov.uk/
The ‘Apply for a passport’ you linked to service is pretty old now and doesn’t reflect GDS’s current recommendations; as far as I understand it it was more of a reskin of an already existing system than anything done from the ground up. However there’s a newer service available from https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport that is much more modern and actively developed. I’m not sure why they’re both still up (although HM Passport Office could probably tell you), but I’m also not sure how you got to the old one because all of the generic ‘passport’ searches I did on GOV.UK took me eventually to the newer version.
The link you posted redirects to original UX disaster after answering ten or so questions (each their own page and a click next). Seems you will only stay on the new site for booking and paying for a traditional walkin appointment.
There are very few positive comments here, but I think it's fantastic that this progress has been made (even if it's not perfect). I had no idea the sites could be used without JS at all; that's brilliant!
Is it sad? I'm quite proud to pay taxes of many different kinds, and I think that the (admittedly quite imperfect) tax system is necessary to a functioning society.
I'd also mention that it's been part of British society since the Roman occupation, so not sure when in time you allude to with your comment but if you're sad about it I suggest investigating a move to one of the functional libertarian nations with no taxes.
Imagine you are a Roman and arguing that slave owning is necessary to a functioning society. You are probably even correct and Roman state wouldn't be possible without slaves. Nevertheless, we know that it wasn't an ethical state order. Taxes are similar - they are involuntary, they are required to have a modern state and they are status quo.
Looking at the past, we see that more and more ways to force people do things against their will were discovered as unethical - e.g. slavery, feudalism, divine rights of kings, coverture.
I think there is a non-zero chance, that future people will consider modern taxation (and probably the idea of Westphalian sovereignty) unethical too.
That said, taxes in their various forms are as old as slavery and it took several centuries for nongovernmental ownership of slaves to become something that society did not approve of. We still have various forms of slavery even without getting into philosophical debates about free will and false choices.
While taxation may change dramatically in the future that type of fundamental change is not really one that can be forecast so far in advance.
well if we're talking about straw men, I didn't actually say it needed to fund a political ideology of any kind. Or say anything about it being compulsory, though in fact I do think it should be.
Moreover, my comment was on the slightly silly notion that 'it's sad this is a thing now' when it has been a thing in Britain since Roman times.
Perhaps the original commentator is harking back to the good old days of pre-Roman occupation? Back when we were truly free. Never had it as good as we did ~30AD. It's gone to the dogs since then ;)
To be fair, that is over almost 1000 years. 13,000 per year is less than how many die each year in Mexico due to drug violence, and much less than the Syrian Civil war.
"That bit"? That was their whole comment! I'm afraid you accused me of 'trotting out a line' when in fact the 'overall sentiment' was implied entirely by yourself.
My advice for next time - less pouncing on comments to shoe-horn in some great ideological stance. Specific discussion is better than generic argument in my book. Good day to you :)
The necessity bit, or the not being compulsory bit?
No snark intended; I'm unsure whether you're an anarchist asking for a defence of the State, or a Statist asking for a defence of voluntary taxation :)
> ...or a Statist asking for a defence of voluntary taxation
Calling the vast majority of people "statist" seems to imply a (false) equivalence between voluntary and compulsorary taxation as competing theories.
Voluntary taxation is a fringe theory with some fairly serious flaws... the primary one in my opinion being that it erodes democracy by pushing even more influence over government into the hands of people with deep enough pockets to pay more (but only when they're happy). The incentives in that kind of system would be all wrong.
By all means have a go at defending voluntary taxation, I'd be interested to hear your opinion.
> Voluntary taxation is a fringe theory with some fairly serious flaws... the primary one in my opinion being that it erodes democracy by pushing even more influence over government into the hands of people with deep enough pockets to pay more (but only when they're happy). The incentives in that kind of system would be all wrong.
It's a side issue to the one we're discussing, but ... that's what we have right now, and the incentives are in fact all wrong.
> By all means have a go at defending voluntary taxation, I'd be interested to hear your opinion.
So, roughly:
1) It's morally wrong to initiate force. Compelling someone to pay for something is as wrong when performed by the Government with a majority mandate, as it is when performed by a mugger.
2) Many other vital services are already paid for voluntarily, by those who benefit from them, and provided for those who can't afford them through private charity. There's nothing special or unique about Government services as opposed to, say, medicine or food.
3) Core Government services are actually pretty cheap - we worked out around NZ$2,500 / adult / year in NZ back in 2000 or so. I hope the vast majority of people would stump up that kind of cash in the absence of any other taxation. If not, I suspect that society is broken in ways that can't be fixed by compulsory taxation, either.
> I hope the vast majority of people would stump up that kind of cash in the absence of any other taxation.
This is, in my view, a pretty naive (maybe to be polite I should say highly optimistic) view of human nature. Even if a majority of people planned to pay it I suspect many would end up not paying it most months as other priorities intervened.
Even if, say, 60% of people did end up paying the voluntary "taxation", a large number would pay nothing. The total sum required would be the same and those willing to pay would have to pay significantly more or there would be a huge shortfall. This would be extremely unfair; freeloaders would get a huge effective pay rise and consequently more influence in society.
In practical terms it would be very difficult to pay for services if if it was not possible to predict how much tax was to be gathered from month to month. Government income would fluctuate wildly. Employment in the public sector would be very risky. The economy would be extremely volatile to say the least. Planning for the future would be next to impossible.
There are many more ethical and practical problems with this idea. I could go on.
Private property is protected by the threat of force, and if violated actual force.
Taxation is protected by the threat of force, and if violated actual force.
You're drawing a boundary around money and calling it yours because it happens to be in your pocket, and saying the government is threatening force to take it... but in the USA in 2017 all that money is not yours, it belongs to the nation in exchange for services, defence, etc. Witholding it is a form of theft; you would be the one violating the property of others and demanding the initiation of force.
> I hope the vast majority of people would stump up that kind of cash in the absence of any other taxation. If not, I suspect that society is broken in ways that can't be fixed by compulsory taxation, either.
To me this is the most interesting line in your reply. There's so much bundled up in here.
First of all; the amount people will pay (and its distribution if they're allowed to nominate policies or departments to fund) would depend entirely on the decision architecture in which their decisions were made.
i.e. Exactly what information is given to citizens and when? What's the nature of their decision? What are the rules and limits? How long is the budget cycle and at what point in the year/month are they making their decision? How are citizens communicated to in the rest of the cycle? What does the broader economy look like after a couple of years of likely-reduced spending? What are the incentives acting on the media and their owners and how does that push them to influence public opinion?
Any mistakes in the implementation of that and it'd be guaranteed to fail (assuming there's any chance of success to begin with).
Secondly, although I think the output of voluntary funding decisions would be mainly a function of decision architecture, that will likely be influenced by overall trends in society. If you read recent work by Robert Putnam you'll probably be aware that the societal indicators of connectedness and social cohesion that he's compiled (things like the % of bipartisan bills, membership of clubs and societies, etc.) have been decreasing from their peak (in around 1964) and are presently on their way down to 1900-era levels. While he doesn't know the cause of that phenomenon, it seems deeply speculative that voluntary tax is the solution.
It's more likely that your desire for voluntary tax is a symptom of your mistrust of others to manage funding decisions for you, i.e. a symptom of the effect he's attempting to understand.
Meta-question: do you believe that ethical decisions in politics must only proceed once someone can point to that decisions having been made in the past? That it is insufficient to point to the _wrong_ inherent to compulsion and say "let's stop this?". Would you make the same argument to abolitionists prior to the Civil War?
Leaving the issue of evidence aside, I'd generalise from the countless vital goods and services that are produced and paid for by voluntary interaction. I'd reason that since those systems work pretty well, it's reasonable to assume that Government would as well.
Then I'd spend many years heavily involved in Libertarian politics, trying to convince others to abandon the use of force against each other, only to quit in disgust when I realised that it was a waste of my time and effort, and that Tiberius' criticism of his Senate ("men fit to be slaves") rings as true today.
I'm saying that some things - for example, slavery - can be proved to be morally wrong without having to perform an examination of the material evidence against it. You wouldn't have to carefully study the conditions on slave ships and plantations to vote for abolition.
> I'm saying that some things - for example, slavery - can be proved to be morally wrong without having to perform an examination of the material evidence against it.
Taxpayers recieve benefits from paying tax. Slaves (those that didn't die) did not.
Taxpayers are able to assemble to discuss the matter, lobby their representatives, campaign for change, vote for the change, campaign for office. Slaves were not.
Taxpayers are free to leave the country and go somewhere new. Slaves, suprise surprise, were not.
> If it is a necessity (I think it is), it's not clear to me how it can not be compulsory.
But you wouldn't make that claim of any _other_ vital service, would you? Food, water, transport, medicine ... all these and more are provided by voluntary payment - or by charity for those who can't afford it.
What's special about Government that it requires compulsion to fund?
All those things are funded for at least some subset of the population, and heavily subsidised for the rest, by the Government. Also, I think it's pretty obvious that "voluntary payment" for healthcare didn't work for many, many people, and has resulted in thousands of deaths and significant needless pain and suffering every year.
How about you just try and reconcile both contradictory points as best you can. I bet it will be some ideological Libertarian fantasy, but please do have a go.
I imagine it'd be the same as every other vital service that's paid for voluntarily. Food, water, medicine, transport... none of which I think are figments of an elaborate Libertarian fantasy ;)
Perhaps you could explain why you believe the provision of Government services is an exception that requires compulsion?
They're not being downvoted for criticising taxation, they're being downvoted for doing so in a trite withering comment that offers no explanation or alternatives.
Actually Compulsory Taxation isn't one of the things you would typically use gov.uk payments for.
In the UK most compulsory taxation is done through PAYE (income tax) or at the sales till (VAT). Gov UK payments is in my experience mostly used for paying for optional things such as renewing your passport, driving license or road duty.
Tesla and anything with wheels powered by an electric motor.
The government of CA except in cases where they can't/won't do something that the various SV special interests would greatly benefit from.
Boondoggle environmental projects.
Government and non-government organizations that align fairly well with HN's ideological bent but have outlived their usefulness to society (e.g. CARB).
I do not feel that reporting every online interaction I have with my government in the UK, back to a huge corporate in the US, is in any way appropriate. But I can't even get anyone to engage on the issue.
When I tried to raise it I got directed to a helpdesk ticket on a site run by an SV helpdesk-as-a-service company.
I appreciate that gov.uk have done some great stuff getting the UK government online, and their designs and Open Source attitude are refreshing, but this is a a serious privacy issue.