Public and private parties use their digital identity to identify themselves online and to verify personal information. What benefits does this have for organizations and consumers? What impact does it have on privacy and digital security? Jacob Boersma, independent expert at WBNoDE.io and chairman of the day at the e-Identity congress, answers your questions in this article.
European digital identity is part of the eIDAS 2.0 regulations. Anyone eligible for a national ID can create a digital identity that is recognized anywhere in the European Union. With it, anyone can identify themselves anywhere in the EU or verify certain personal information, such as age, address or medical information. Electronic data exchange and transactions will be more secure and transparent as a result.
The purpose of the European digital identity is to create an unambiguous and secure way to identify yourself (online). Public and private parties in EU countries use different ways to identify yourself or to submit official documents. Organizations and individuals lose a lot of time, the process is unclear and often not secure. A unified and centralized process solves these problems. Therefore, the goal of the EU is to provide 80% of the European population with a digital identity within three years.
A European digital identity offers several advantages for both citizens and public and private organizations: your identity is verifiable anywhere in the European Union; you have control over the identity data you share; all the information you need, for example, to check in at a hotel, submit medical data or file a tax return, is conveniently located in one place; and processes are streamlined, for example, through a digital signature, timestamp or identity card.
"It is very good that there will be an app where you can load identity data. After all, everyone can experiment with controlling their own identity data. It thus breaks through an important chicken-and-egg discussion that has been going on for decades in the world of digital identity," Boersma said.
The implementation of a European digital identity also brings risks and discussion. "Transactions can be tracked, so there is loss of privacy. This creates resistance from society because the benefits are not properly explained. In addition, the question is how to deal with citizens for whom the application is too complex to deal with." Boersma thus argues that there is still work to be done before the European digital identity can be applied without problems.
Boersma notes that there is increasing interest in decentralized digital identity from government and business. For example, they want to know how the identity ecosystem can be set up so that there is not one central provider of data. Instead, the goal is a collaboration of different sources that the citizen/consumer himself combines depending on the context.
