The Guardian view on privacy: computers gossip | Editorial

We need secure digital identities but they must never be allowed to grow too large and powerful

At the beginning of the internet age, people used to go online, but no longer. Instead we live there from the moment we first pick up a smartphone to the moment it is laid on a bedside table. Our digital lives are now as real as money, and so debates about online privacy are actually about our political freedoms. Around the world these debates are reaching very different conclusions.

Last week, the Indian supreme court decided that the country's constitution guaranteed a right to privacy. This disrupts and at least delays the government's plans to ensure that everyone in the country not only has, but must use, a unique identity number tied into biometric scans, so that in theory (for in practice the technology is always flawed) more than a billion people can be reliably and uniquely identified.

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