Big Brother Watch’s Jasleen Chaggar said: ‘Snuck into the consultation is an admission that the police would be allowed to repurpose our digital ID photos as mugshots to create a population-wide facial recognition database. ‘It is for precisely this reason that the public is rightly sceptical of a sprawling ID system that has been sold to us under various guises – whether to “stop the boats” or improve public services – but which invariably hands more power and more of our personal information to the state, at our expense.’ ‘Given the public backlash, high costs, serious data risks and likelihood that this could become a mandatory scheme in practice, the government should drop this digital ID disaster altogether.’