One of the first things that the new government in the UK have done is announce that they are scrapping the contentious ID card scheme that the old-new-labour government was trying to push for some unknown reason.

 This is great news:  The removal of a money sink that nobody really wanted and would not only be an infringement on civil liberties but would not work in the way that they wanted it to.

 A thought crossed my mind though, and maybe this just shows that I’m behind the curve, but maybe the reason they scrapped the scheme wasn’t to save money or to protect civil liberties, but just because the whole thing is entirely redundant with the popularity of Facebook.

Why spend time and money issuing everyone with an ID card and enforcing their constant possession of said item when people are quite happy to spend hours and hours of their spare time updating their own ID card in the form of their Facebook profile, including pictures of where they’ve gone on holiday and where they go out with friends, who they are associated with, what their world views are, dates of when they leave the country and return and in a lot of cases, actual physical addresses?

Private detectives have never had it so easy!