[Anonymouse]

You know what they really want: national IDs.That would "solve" the "problem" of proving your identity, also the age verification thing which is not so slowly paralysing the Internet.
Isn't it curious that Douglas Adams saw this coming in 1992 (or maybe earlier - how long did he take on his fifth Hitch-Hiker book?):

It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe.
Just look at cashpoint machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours.
And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying. Hence the Ident-i-Eeze.
This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

- Mostly Harmless

(Ford goes on to abuse the card in a variety of ways before putting it back.)

I think Douglas was right. That all sounds terribly familiar. We're not there yet, but we're going that way. When, when, I would like to know, will UK governments see 1984 as the satire and warning Orwell intended, and not as a bloody instruction manual - "How To Run A Dictatorship Disguised As A Democratic Society"? WHEN?!

(BTW: Hi, Echelon! Your favourite free thinker - a.k.a. subversive - here! Yes, I dare to think for myself - not too well these days, I grant you, since the stroke - and, shock horror, to have my own opinions!)

I haven't signed my debit and credit cards - never mind that I can freeze them via the Barclays app once I discover they're missing, anyone who finds a signed card now has your signature. That can be copied and used for all sorts of things. I don't risk it. Once quantum encryption is a practical reality we might be able to relax a bit, because it'll be intrinsically uncrackable. You'd need the Infinity Stones to break quantum encryption, because you'd need to alter the laws of physics. Outside the power of the Six (if they were real), you can't.
Even the DWP has security questions. I'm tired of confirming the names of the street I grew up on and my first pet (Tibby, an ace mouser - Mum didn't want a cat, and Dad just said, "Well, we'll have to have the bloody mice, then!" So we got a kitten; a neighbour was finding homes for the kittens her cat had. Not that we paid for him, but he soon proved his worth; the mice were rapidly exterminated and/or went elsewhere) just to sign on.

Another thought: facial recognition is far from perfect. I've known 12-year-olds who looked 18...and 18-year-olds who looked 12. Can an AI tell? I doubt it.