UK Government Sets Out its Digital Identity Plans
Since leaving the EU in January 2020, the UK government has worked to establish a distinct policy perspective on citizen identity and its relation to the state. As the EU starts to trial aspects of the European Digital Identity through large-scale pilots to test the deployment of the European Digital Identity Wallet the UK is planning its own Office for Digital Identities (ODIA).
The UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has outlined the plans for ODIA in its response to the public consultation on digital identities 1. It said this will be a step towards making digital identities as trusted and secure as official paper documents such as passports and driving licences.
This also marks the next step in fostering the development of an ecosystem for digital identities and attributes, following last year’s proposals for a trust framework and a governing body. The ODIA will be set up within the DCMS to fulfil the role on an interim basis to oversee the relevant security and privacy standards.
It will have the power to issue an easily recognised trustmark to organisations that are certified to provide digital identities by proving they meet the standards to handle personal data safely and consistently.
The government intends to bring forward legislation aimed at: establishing a robust and secure accreditation and certification process along with the trustmark; creating a legal gateway for trusted organisations to carry out verification checks against data held by public bodies to validate a person’s identity; and confirm the legal validity of digital forms of identification.
The announcement of the intention to establish ODIA comes at a time when the government has recently selected consulting firm Deloitte to launch a mobile identity app for accessing government services. The project aims to offer a secure one-stop-shop for a range of public services across multiple departments.
It is reported that Deloitte’s identity verification solution will leverage the near- field communication (NFC) technology embedded in most smartphones. This will also support mobile payments and scanning of documents containing biometric chips, such as passports. Meanwhile, the finished product may also incorporate some other forms of biometric authentication, such as facial or fingerprint recognition.
According to the contract notice 2 for the Deloitte deal, the company will provide professional services for the digital identity unit in the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), supporting discovery research on needs and value of the app and in building up its internal engineering capability in app development.
The contract is valued at £4.8 million and is due to run until February 2024.
In another area of citizen digital identity, the UK parliament has debated an online petition that gathered almost 700,000 signatures that would make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account to prevent anonymised harmful activity, providing traceability if an offence occurs. Where the account belongs to a person under the age of 18, the account would be verified with the ID of a parent/ guardian.
The response from the government, given after the debate on 28 February 2022, raises some interesting questions about digital anonymity which, the UK government believes, underpins people’s fundamental right to express themselves and access information online in a liberal democracy.
In its response the government recognised concerns linked to anonymity online, which can sometimes be exploited by bad actors seeking to engage in harmful activity.
However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity.
1 - www.gov.uk/government/consultations/digital-identity-and-attributes-consultation
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