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From Geoff Lane

If my ID card contains an “identity” based on some biometric to do with my body, why do I need to carry an ID card?

I am me. I carry my body around wherever I go. Why do I need an ID card that merely duplicates the information and is so easily lost or stolen?

To be useful the cards have to be compared to a known copy of the data on some central system and then the biometric data has to be measured on my body and compared. The card is a pointless, error-prone additional step.

Duncan Graham-Rowe writes:

• If you have no card and scan just, say, the iris, the only way to identify someone is to search a massive database for an iris that matches. This is a one-to-many match, which is a lot more demanding than simply doing a one-to-one match with a single biometric template of an iris stored on the card, and more prone to error.

Bury, Greater Manchester, UK