Privacy, Capitalism, and Starmers Brit Card

Privacy should be a human right.

And yet under capitalism, it is something that can only be imperfectly approximated through withdrawal: refusing smartphones and “smart” technologies, working cash-in-hand, avoiding CCTV (a near impossibility in British cities).

But we are far from being anarcho-individualists.

Human freedom does not lie in isolation, further, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

We must then make use of the tools we have at hand under our current system.

Within this same understanding, we recognize that it is society, and our collective forces, which allow us to cures illness, produces energy, and keeps food on our tables.

Capitalism itself emerged historically as a system that developed the productive forces beyond what was possible under previous modes of production.

That development, however, came at the cost of exploitation, inequality, and repression of the majority class.

In short, it elevated our productive forces but entrenched class antagonism.

Therefore, our task as socialists isn’t the destruction of society, but the seizure of the organs of capital that control it for private gain.

The Commodification of Privacy

In the current moment, privacy itself has been commodified. We either pay for privacy with money and knowledge or surrender our privacy in return for a semblance of convenience. Around 50% of people browsing the web do not use an ad-blocker, Less than 2.2% use Firefox, compared with Google Chrome’s 66% market share.

Over 91% of people rely on Google’s search engine, while DuckDuckGo (a privacy-focused alternative) holds only 0.6%.

These figures do not reflect consumer preference or product quality.

On the contrary, antitrust proceedings have shown that Google has knowingly degraded its own search results which forces users to conduct multiple searches to find what they had been looking for, with each search an ads is generated and this results in higher profits for google, while Facebook has invested vast resources in making its platform toxic, deliberately provoking outrage to keep users scrolling, this is emotional manipulation.

What we are seeing is not competition, but monopoly power, market capture, and the systematic enclosure of digital life through coercive patterns. this is all an unavoidable reality under this current system.

Under modern capitalism, participation in social life has increasingly requires entry into these privately owned digital infrastructures.

This is far from accidental. It is a form of entrapment often described as dependency engineering: platforms are designed so that exiting becomes costly, loosing access to our social circles, distant family, and job prospects.

To exist online, and increasingly to function at work, we are compelled to enter walled gardens where we are monitored and trapped by engineered obligation.

The question before us is not whether digital systems can exist, but who controls them, for what purpose, and under which class power.

Privacy or Participation

This contradiction is not abstract.Five years ago, I had entirely removed myself from mainstream platforms: like Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Outlook.

That position changed after joining the Socialist Party, functioning as a comrade required installing WhatsApp, Zoom and the use of google doc’s.

Later, starting a new job meant being contractually required to install a clocking-in app on my own personal device.

then taking on an officer’s role with Unite the Union meant using Microsoft’s outlook services.

Even here, we are using Zoom to host this evenings meeting. The choice was privacy or convenience. It is now privacy or participation, and ultimately participation or destitution.

Big tech understands this dynamic all-to-well.

WhatsApp, for example, began life as a small messaging app developed by two ex-Yahoo engineers which gained popularity for its strong encryption and privacy features.

Once it became an essential social infrastructure, Facebook acquired the app for $19 billion in 2014, not for the product itself or for our own personal benefit, but for the personal data attached.

Users were invited in, then locked, our data is scraped, predictive models are made based on our behaviors, personalized ad space is then sold to marketing agencies.

These Silicon Vally companies are no longer focused on technology.

They have become data-brokers. And we are no longer the customer; we are the product.

Facebook has gone even further than just buying competitors.

In 2016 Facebook covertly scraped rival platform snapchat (internally know to Facebook as Project Ghostbusters), Facebook had been illegally collecting vast quantities of user data form rival the platform in order to build competing services.

What would be criminal Privacy, Capitalism, and Starmers Brit Card

Privacy should a human right.

And yet under capitalism, it is something that can only be imperfectly approximated through withdrawal: refusing smartphones and “smart” technologies, working cash-in-hand, avoiding CCTV (a near impossibility in British cities).

But we are far from being anarcho-individualists.

Human freedom does not lie in isolation, further, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

We must then make use of the tools we have at hand under our current system.

Within this same understanding, we recognize that it is society, and our collective forces, which allow us to cures illness, produces energy, and keeps food on our tables.

Capitalism itself emerged historically as a system that developed the productive forces beyond what was possible under previous modes of production.

That development, however, came at the cost of exploitation, inequality, and repression of the majority class.

In short, it elevated our productive forces but entrenched class antagonism. Therefore, our task as socialists isn’t the destruction of society, but the seizure of the organs of capital that control it for private gain.

The Commodification of Privacy

In the current moment, privacy itself has been commodified. We either pay for privacy with money and knowledge or surrender our privacy in return for a semblance of convenience. Around 50% of people browsing the web do not use an ad-blocker, Less than 2.2% use Firefox, compared with Google Chrome’s 66% market share.

Over 91% of people rely on Google’s search engine, while DuckDuckGo (a privacy-focused alternative) holds only 0.6%.

These figures do not reflect consumer preference or product quality.

On the contrary, antitrust proceedings have shown that Google has knowingly degraded its own search results which forces users to conduct multiple searches to find what they had been looking for, with each search an ads is generated and this results in higher profits for google, while Facebook has invested vast resources in making its platform toxic, deliberately provoking outrage to keep users scrolling, this is emotional manipulation.

What we are seeing is not competition, but monopoly power, market capture, and the systematic enclosure of digital life through coercive patterns. this is all an unavoidable reality under this current system.

Under modern capitalism, participation in social life has increasingly requires entry into these privately owned digital infrastructures.

This is far from accidental. It is a form of entrapment often described as dependency engineering: platforms are designed so that exiting becomes costly, loosing access to our social circles, distant family, and job prospects.

To exist online, and increasingly to function at work, we are compelled to enter walled gardens where we are monitored and trapped by engineered obligation.

The question before us is not whether digital systems can exist, but who controls them, for what purpose, and under which class power.

Privacy or Participation

This contradiction is not abstract.Five years ago, I had entirely removed myself from mainstream platforms: like Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Outlook.

That position changed after joining the Socialist Party, functioning as a comrade required installing WhatsApp, Zoom and the use of google doc’s.

Later, starting a new job meant being contractually required to install a clocking-in app on my own personal device.

then taking on an officer’s role with Unite the Union meant using Microsoft’s outlook services.

Even here, we are using Zoom to host this evenings meeting. The choice was privacy or convenience. It is now privacy or participation, and ultimately participation or destitution.

Big tech understands this dynamic all-to-well.

WhatsApp, for example, began life as a small messaging app developed by two ex-Yahoo engineers which gained popularity for its strong encryption and privacy features.

Once it became an essential social infrastructure, Facebook acquired the app for $19 billion in 2014, not for the product itself or for our own personal benefit, but for the personal data attached.

Users were invited in, then locked, our data is scraped, predictive models are made based on our behaviors, personalized ad space is then sold to marketing agencies.

These Silicon Vally companies are no longer focused on technology.

They have become data-brokers. And we are no longer the customer; we are the product.

Facebook has gone even further than just buying competitors.

In 2016 Facebook covertly scraped rival platform snapchat (internally know to Facebook as Project Ghostbusters), Facebook had been illegally collecting vast quantities of user data form rival the platform in order to build competing services.

What would be criminal behavior for us and met with lengthy prison sentence is treated as a regulatory issue for corporations, punished with fines that amount to operating costs.

These are not isolated scandals.

They are systemic expressions of capitalism’s central contradiction: a system driven by the need for infinite accumulation in a finite world, constantly forced to invent new frontiers of extraction.

When natural resources, labour, and markets are exhausted, human behavior itself becomes the resource to be tapped.

From Corporate Surveillance to State Control It is in this context that Keir Starmer’s proposed Brit Card must be understood. On 26th of September 2025, Starmer announced plans for a mandatory digital ID card policy for all UK workers.

A policy missing from Labours electoral manifesto. Within 24 hours, over one million people had signed a petition opposing this proposed policy.

And despite this opposition, the proposal is still being promoted.

This is not a new idea. Digital ID has long been a Blairite Labour policy.

Under Tony Blair, the Identity Cards Act 2006 was introduced and justified as a response to terrorism, the moral panic of that time.

Costing £250 million and later scrapped.

And now, Starmer has repackaged the same proposal as a tool to prevent “illegal migrant labour”, this is echoing the rhetoric of Reform and the reactionary right.

This justification collapses under scrutiny.

Employers are already legally required to verify workers’ right to work. Failure to do so can result in fines of up to £60,000 per worker with criminal prosecution against the employer, and can result in prison sentences. The Brit Card will do nothing to prevent bosses from super-exploiting migrant labour.

Its real function lies elsewhere.

What the Brit Card Actually Does

Starmer’s proposal would initially link the Brit Card to employment status, government services, healthcare access, as well as financial records. In practice, this means centralizing identity, health, and economic data under a single unified digital identifier.

Which represents a profound threat to civil liberties.

A centralized database of sensitive personal information is an exceptionally high-value target for cyber-criminals and future big-tech contractors.

The British state has a long history of catastrophic IT failures involving private contractors such as: the Post Office’s Horizon scandal, the abandoned NHS National Program for IT, Test and Trace, and repeated ransomware attacks on the NHS and major NHS partners.

There is no reason to believe the Brit Card system would be immune from bugs, outages, or future exploitation at the hands of big tech contractors.

And even temporary failures could result in workers being denied employment, housing, healthcare, or benefits.

The proposed system would require a government-issued digital-wallet-app be installed on our personal devices.

The questions are: who will audit the code? Who controls access? What safeguards prevent function creep; in this context, function creep would be the gradual expansion of surveillance powers beyond their original remit.

Labour, Capital, and Control

Blair’s Labour government failed to impose ID cards despite being far more popular than Starmer’s current leadership.

Starmer’s Labour is weaker, deeply distrusted by the working-class, and openly committed to austerity and “fiscal discipline” in the interests of capital.

So why is this policy still being pushed?

Because parliamentary politics does not operate in isolation.

Digital ID is not being driven by public demand, or even public need, far from it, it is driven by powerful interests outside the electoral arena, the same interests that pushed for ID-Cards under Blair and has gone on to donate £257 million to the Blair’s Blair Institute think tank.

And this is how the Overtone Window shifts.

Extreme proposals are introduced not necessarily to be implemented immediately, but to shift the boundaries of what is considered reasonable.

What once appeared unthinkable becomes discuss-able; what is discuss-able becomes policy.

Digital ID may be widely opposed, but its discussion normalizes lesser intrusions: private contractors handling NHS data, lessening regulations on access to personal records by private interests, and the deepening integration of big tech into the state and our personal lives.

Surveillance by Design

Digital ID does not introduce surveillance into society. It does, however, centralize, legitimize, and enforces a surveillance regime that capitalism has already made, only with digital ID it would be inescapable.

If Digital ID could be implemented, it would not be the state alone handling this data, but private corporations embedded within government. Data is enormously profitable, and under capitalism, it will be exploited for profit.

More fundamentally, Digital ID represents an attempt to discipline labour: controlling access to work, services, and social participation through technological means.

It is the formalization of the same coercion already experienced under platform capitalism, but legitimized by the state.

That is why the Brit Card must be opposed.

Not as a technical mistake or a poorly implemented policy, but as a class project.

One that strengthens capital, weakens workers, and collective resistance, further, we must understand the class dynamics behind Digital ID and similar schemes.

A party of the working class would not profit from our personal data.

It would fight the incursion of capitalism, not manage it more efficiently.

Through democratic centralism, the mass of society would decide collectively what technologies are built, how they are used, and for whose benefit.

Technology itself is not the enemy.

Under socialism, technology could be developed for human need rather than mass surveillance, coercion, and profit extraction.

We must therefore be pro-technology, but uncompromisingly critical of technology under capitalism.

Socialism is not a parallel system running alongside capitalism; it is its historical successor.

It represents the movement beyond exploitation and repression, toward a society in which human development is no longer subordinated to profit or class power.behavior for us and met with lengthy prison sentence is treated as a regulatory issue for corporations, punished with fines that amount to operating costs.

These are not isolated scandals.

They are systemic expressions of capitalism’s central contradiction: a system driven by the need for infinite accumulation in a finite world, constantly forced to invent new frontiers of extraction.

When natural resources, labour, and markets are exhausted, human behavior itself becomes the resource to be tapped.

From Corporate Surveillance to State Control It is in this context that Keir Starmer’s proposed Brit Card must be understood. On 26th of September 2025, Starmer announced plans for a mandatory digital ID card policy for all UK workers.

A policy missing from Labours electoral manifesto. Within 24 hours, over one million people had signed a petition opposing this proposed policy.

And despite this opposition, the proposal is still being promoted.

This is not a new idea. Digital ID has long been a Blairite Labour policy.

Under Tony Blair, the Identity Cards Act 2006 was introduced and justified as a response to terrorism, the moral panic of that time.

Costing £250 million and later scrapped.

And now, Starmer has repackaged the same proposal as a tool to prevent “illegal migrant labour”, this is echoing the rhetoric of Reform and the reactionary right.

This justification collapses under scrutiny.

Employers are already legally required to verify workers’ right to work. Failure to do so can result in fines of up to £60,000 per worker with criminal prosecution against the employer, and can result in prison sentences. The Brit Card will do nothing to prevent bosses from super-exploiting migrant labour.

Its real function lies elsewhere.

What the Brit Card Actually Does

Starmer’s proposal would initially link the Brit Card to employment status, government services, healthcare access, as well as financial records. In practice, this means centralizing identity, health, and economic data under a single unified digital identifier.

Which represents a profound threat to civil liberties.

A centralized database of sensitive personal information is an exceptionally high-value target for cyber-criminals and future big-tech contractors.

The British state has a long history of catastrophic IT failures involving private contractors such as: the Post Office’s Horizon scandal, the abandoned NHS National Program for IT, Test and Trace, and repeated ransomware attacks on the NHS and major NHS partners.

There is no reason to believe the Brit Card system would be immune from bugs, outages, or future exploitation at the hands of big tech contractors.

And even temporary failures could result in workers being denied employment, housing, healthcare, or benefits.

The proposed system would require a government-issued digital-wallet-app be installed on our personal devices.

The questions are: who will audit the code? Who controls access? What safeguards prevent function creep; in this context, function creep would be the gradual expansion of surveillance powers beyond their original remit.

Labour, Capital, and Control

Blair’s Labour government failed to impose ID cards despite being far more popular than Starmer’s current leadership.

Starmer’s Labour is weaker, deeply distrusted by the working-class, and openly committed to austerity and “fiscal discipline” in the interests of capital.

So why is this policy still being pushed?

Because parliamentary politics does not operate in isolation.

Digital ID is not being driven by public demand, or even public need, far from it, it is driven by powerful interests outside the electoral arena, the same interests that pushed for ID-Cards under Blair and has gone on to donate £257 million to the Blair’s Blair Institute think tank.

And this is how the Overtone Window shifts.

Extreme proposals are introduced not necessarily to be implemented immediately, but to shift the boundaries of what is considered reasonable.

What once appeared unthinkable becomes discuss-able; what is discuss-able becomes policy.

Digital ID may be widely opposed, but its discussion normalizes lesser intrusions: private contractors handling NHS data, lessening regulations on access to personal records by private interests, and the deepening integration of big tech into the state and our personal lives.

Surveillance by Design

Digital ID does not introduce surveillance into society. It does, however, centralize, legitimize, and enforces a surveillance regime that capitalism has already made, only with digital ID it would be inescapable.

If Digital ID could be implemented, it would not be the state alone handling this data, but private corporations embedded within government. Data is enormously profitable, and under capitalism, it will be exploited for profit.

More fundamentally, Digital ID represents an attempt to discipline labour: controlling access to work, services, and social participation through technological means.

It is the formalization of the same coercion already experienced under platform capitalism, but legitimized by the state.

That is why the Brit Card must be opposed.

Not as a technical mistake or a poorly implemented policy, but as a class project.

One that strengthens capital, weakens workers, and collective resistance, further, we must understand the class dynamics behind Digital ID and similar schemes.

A party of the working class would not profit from our personal data.

It would fight the incursion of capitalism, not manage it more efficiently.

Through democratic centralism, the mass of society would decide collectively what technologies are built, how they are used, and for whose benefit.

Technology itself is not the enemy.

Under socialism, technology could be developed for human need rather than mass surveillance, coercion, and profit extraction.

We must therefore be pro-technology, but uncompromisingly critical of technology under capitalism.

Socialism is not a parallel system running alongside capitalism; it is its historical successor.

It represents the movement beyond exploitation and repression, toward a society in which human development is no longer subordinated to profit or class power.