ID cards have arrived. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Last week, Manchester Evening News journalist Angela Epstein became the first British member of the public to possess an ID card. As one of the few journos to favour the card, the Home Office asked if she’d like to be first to test it out. “I’m so proud I could almost burst,” she wrote about this “seminal moment”.

As far as she was concerned: “They are a small, convenient and portable way to prove identity.” Just how wrong can she be? Just how wrong can all those ministers and civil servants who have been pushing the idea of ID cards be?

At present, you prove your identity to various authorities with assorted bits of information, bills with your address on, your driving licence, your passport, your birth certificate and so on. ID cards are intended to replace the hassle of all that paperwork, rolling it all up into a “small, convenient and portable way to prove identity”? As the Prime Minister said last year, biometrics “securely link an individual to a unique identity”.

And there is the fatal flaw. It has been widely reported that IT experts can steal biometric data with ease, whether used on an ID card or the new-style passports that every country in the world now issues. The information on the chips can be read and copied from up to 30 feet away, even if the card or passport is in a sealed envelope. As Dame Stella Rimington, ex-head of MI5 said:

“If we have ID cards…and people can go into a back room and forge them they are going to be absolutely useless.”

Even if the data isn’t stolen, the chips carry a record of your fingerprints. As researchers at Clarkson University found in 2005, fingerprints can be “stolen” from almost any surface using Play-Doh, gelatine or even a fake plaster finger. So somebody else, with little effort, could leave your fingerprints at a crime scene.

It is the consequence of either of these things happening that nobody appears to have thought through. And it is an appalling consquence.

Supposing somebody steals your biometric data and uses it for some nefarious purpose. Who will be blamed?

You.

Suppose somebody commits a crime and leaves not their fingerprints at the scene, but yours. Whose name will the central database throw up?

Yours.

Even if you can somehow prove that you were not involved, your identity is no longer yours alone. It also now belongs to a criminal. Until recently, you could be issued with a new passport, birth certificate or national insurance number and start over. But there is no starting over with biometric identity chips. Any new ID card or passport will have exactly the same biometric data, “securely” linked to you. You can hardly change your fingerprints. You are stuck with them.

For life.

For the rest of your life, you will be unable to prove that you actually are you.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.