In April 1999 I attended a meeting that I shall have to be very vague about, as it was held under the Chatham House Rule. So being suitably circumspect I can reveal that a group of MPs met representatives of two large multinational IT providers to talk about smartcards, in a building by the Thames that boasts a very large clock.

From my vantage point in the oiks' gallery I was simultaneously impressed and deeply dismayed. Impressed that politicians wanted to get to grips with what was then a relatively obscure technology, and dismayed at some of the content.

Shamefully, the two IT vendors offered undiluted sales pitches, painting smartcards as the drawback-free solution to all manner of ills. One vendor talked in glowing terms about a smartcard-based digital cash scheme in Holland. I'd had first-hand experience of this patchy project and knew the vendor was being frugal with the facts.

But once the PowerPoint slides were done, things got more interesting. As you might imagine, our democratically-elected representatives were preoccupied with identity cards. Some also asked about smartcard Tube ticketing - then a plan and now a reality with the Oyster card - and driving licences and NHS cards. One of the MPs asked how much scope there was for cards that did multiple things. Could, say, London Underground issue a capacious card and sell space to third-parties for add-on facilities? Should banks be allowed to do the same?

Other questions followed naturally. What might the data protection issues be? Might a national identity card be more palatable if it also served as a digital wallet? How would such a card be managed and secured, to ensure that different readers saw only their own information? Who should pay for such a card? And who should own it?

These were all interesting questions and ones for which there were few ready answers.

As I listened, I had only one smartcard about my person - the SIM in my mobile phone. Today, like most people, I carry quite a few. Those not issued by banks tend to be contactless - designed to be waved at card readers. They aren't always happy bedfellows: they often mess up each others' signals when scanned together in the wallet.

There are specifications for collision avoidance, but evidently they are not being ubiquitously applied. I suspect measures for security are just as loosely observed.

Now that we are definitely on course for a national ID card scheme, I can't help recalling the questions posed by those MPs.

There is merit in the idea of a general-purpose smartcard. Why not have a card that can be loaded with data and passwords and permissions as required? Why not have some ownership and control over the data that you carry, personally, for use by other organisations?

The alternative is for people to carry an increasingly thick stack of cards that they don't trust. Unprompted, a colleague said he was unhappy that his Oyster card "lets them track you wherever you go".

Smartcards deserve as much deliberation as the use of cookies, the availability of broadband, road pricing or the allocation of radio spectrum. But as long as identity cards remain such a divisive issue, it seems unlikely that there'll be much worthwhile debate about making smarter use of the computers in all our pockets.