The government's long-awaited digital strategy that knits together plans for the opening up of vast quantities of citizen data across the public sector and beyond with promises—once again—to improve online public services for Brits landed with a thud on Thursday morning.

It represents yet another reboot for the Government Digital Service team, which has been waiting in stasis to learn of its future, after then chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne coughed up a surprise £450 million wad of cash for GDS in late 2015. The service has been repeatedly lambasted for delays to the rollout of key IT systems such as its ID service Verify.

The strategy contains plenty of moving parts, not just about the future of GDS, IT contracts, legacy systems, and digital skills, but more worryingly—for privacy campaigners and, frankly, anyone who cares about how their highly personal information might be shared by the government—suggests a disconnect between what Whitehall is proposing and the data sharing powers it is hoping to imminently ram through parliament.

It's worth noting, too, the timing of the cabinet office's announcement: the strategy has been published a day after committee stage scrutiny of the Digital Economy Bill ended in the House of Lords. Parliament is about to go into recess, and when it returns, peers will have little time to pore over the proposed legislation before it reaches report stage on February 22 when votes on any amendments to the bill will take place.

However, Ars understands that while the cabinet office has privately been promising to make amendments to the highly controversial clause 30 of the Digital Economy Bill on data sharing—which has been described by a House of Lords committee as a big push from Whitehall for "untrammelled powers"—realistically, there isn't any time left for a rewrite.

Returning to the strategy, however, Brits are encouraged by the government to believe its pledge that it "remains opposed to national ID cards, and has no plans to create a national identity database." In effect, it is saying to citizens "trust us, we'll do right by you" even though it has failed to offer up legal and technical safeguards on the face of the Digital Economy Bill.

A question of trust

Privacy campaigner Phil Booth—who previously fought the Care.data NHS system and National ID cards—described the government's mixed messages as "devastating." He told Ars that the so-called "Government Transformation Strategy" didn't sit well side-by-side with Whitehall's big legislative push to crack open citizens' data. "Which do you believe, the current draft legislation, or a PDF?" he asked.

The broadly defined clause 30 of the Digital Economy Bill contains provisions for a "single gateway to enable public authorities, specified by regulation, to share personal information for tightly constrained reasons agreed by parliament, where its purpose is to improve the welfare of the individual in question. To use the gateway, the proposed sharing of information must be for the purpose of one of the specified objectives, which will be set out in regulations."

But those regulations made by an "appropriate national authority"—as recently noted by the Lords' delegated powers and regulatory reform committee—aren't specified anywhere on the face of the bill. Similarly, the strategy talks about data-sharing meeting "user needs" that "satisfies the appropriate safeguards." Again, the supposed safeguards are missing from the face of the draft legislation.

Booth argued that the government, with its planned law, will have "carte blanche to do what it likes with citizens' data." He added that "health data is smeared all over this bill."

Back in 2009, the then Labour government had pushed for similar data-sharing powers in clause 152 of the draft Coroners and Justice Bill. However, it rowed back on those plans in the face of heavy criticism. At the time, Tory MP Dominic Grieve had this to say:

The government are proposing to drive a coach and horses through the duty of confidentiality that the the state owes to individuals in any case where a quite nebulous concept of public good decides to trump the private right.

Indeed, the Tories—during the party's opposition years—repeatedly attacked the Labour government's seeming obsession with its policies on citizen identity. Fast forward to today, however, and readers may be forgiven for suffering from a serious bout of déjà vu. In the strategy, for example, we're told:

We will build on recent GDS discovery work to explore the best way to support more secure and efficient access across organisational boundaries to personal data already held by government, within legal gateways. This will help government to offer better, more joined-up services, while appropriately protecting the privacy and security of personal data, in particular adhering to the principle that, in any given use case, data access should be the minimum necessary to fulfil the stated service objective. The government remains opposed to national ID cards, and has no plans to create a national identity database.

As part of that plan, GDS will be expected to get its heavily delayed Verify system—which is suppose to provide "one account to securely prove" a citizen's identity, before they are able to access online public services—to "work with the private sector so that users can use the same account to prove their identity online for private sector services, like opening a bank account without having to go into a branch."

Pilots for that system will begin this year, the cabinet office said. And GDS hopes to have 25 million Brits using Verify by 2020—even though it has already been cold-shouldered by HMRC, which is reportedly working on a separate ID service.

It's just one of the plans which, according to cabinet office minister Ben Gummer, is "transforming the relationship between the citizen and the state." Those fretting about privacy might be mildly comforted by the government's pledge to wheel out a new chief data officer along with a new data advisory board.

"We must earn and retain the trust of citizens and provide reassurance that personal and sensitive data is treated safely, securely, and ethically within appropriate governance frameworks," the cabinet office vowed. It would seem that Brits will have to take the government's words at face value if—as now seems inevitable—controversial data-sharing provisions in the Digital Economy Bill are waved through parliament.