News in Brief

ID4Africa LiveCast Focuses on Ethiopia

Ethiopia is among the latest countries to launch its digital ID project, and the project is ‘advancing rapidly,’ according to ID4Africa Executive Chairman Dr Joseph Atick during the i-on-Ethiopia section of Episode 34 of the ID4Africa’s LiveCasts.

Among the panellists, Ethiopia’s National ID Programme’s (NIPD) Executive Director, Yodahe Zemichael, said that the country is preparing for a full national roll-out by ensuring that the foundation is ready. The Fayda (roughly translated as ‘value’ from both Swahili and Arabic) biometric national ID functions as both a legal identity and a functional identity, he explained, as part of the civil registry system and also an element in the country’s digital economic transformation plan.

Al Shiferaw, of public health consultants JSI, talked about the importance of Ethiopia’s government and people having ownership over the system. This was a driving factor behind the adoption of the MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform) -based system, which allows local implementation, management and maintenance of the ID.

The partnership between NIDP and MOSIP has recently been extended with a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enable extensive field testing and a pilot rollout with a goal of 100,000 biometric registrations to the digital ID system.

Under the MoU, MOSIP will support the assessment of the Ethiopian ID solution and its potential to improve the efficiency, transparency, and targeted delivery of public services.

To view the LiveCast, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aZEPU_Qt4E.

South Korea Aims to Boost Economy with Digital ID on Blockchain

South Korea plans to offer a digital identity secured by blockchain to citizens with a smartphone as it taps into the world’s most tech-savvy population to boost economic growth.

Koreans are considered to be among the most enthusiastic and capable when it comes to applying technology in everyday life, businesses and government – but the country still relies on resident registration cards, similar to a US social security card – to identify themselves. Under a proposal being spearheaded by the country’s digital-government bureau, an app would digitally embed those IDs into citizens’ mobile devices.

Korea will launch digital IDs in 2024 and seeks their adoption by 45 million citizens within two years.

That ambition may be hampered by each individual needing to travel to a town office and paying a fee to renew their registration card. Suh Bo Ram, Director General of the digital-government bureau, acknowledged these concerns while expressing confidence that the hurdles will pale in comparison to the benefits. The government, he said, is also aware of ‘big brother’ concerns, referring to George Orwell’s novel, 1984.

Under the plan, the government will have no access to information stored on individual phones, including details of whose digital IDs are used, how they are used and where, because the system will rely entirely on decentralised identity, an advanced strand of blockchain technology, he said.

It is also believed that use of a distributed ledger would make it more robust against cyberattack, as hackers would have to break into each individual device to manipulate data, while the chance of theft is reduced because there’s no central server storing information.

150,000 Passport Numbers Exposed in Optus Hack

One of the major vulnerabilities of centralised digital personally identifiable information (PII) databases is the ‘reverse honeytrap’ phenomena, in which storing all the information behind a series of firewalls and other defences has the effect of attracting cyberattacks. And so it was that at least 2.1 million personal identification details, including 150,000 passport and 50,000 Medicare numbers, have been stolen in the data hack of Australian telecommunications company, Optus.

Optus has come under sustained criticism from the federal government since the cyber security breach, including criticisms of the company for having insufficient safeguards to protect consumers’ information and taking too long to inform customers about whether they had been caught up in the breach.

The company’s Chief Executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin defended the company’s communications process.

‘As we’ve had the data about what information is compromised for each person, we have been communicating to them,’ she said. ‘And we’ve been working with the licensing authorities so that they’re in a position to actually help those customers, and so we don’t create more chaos and confusion.’ 

Various government ministers have criticised Optus for not providing data on who had their personally identifiable numbers accessed. Bayer Rosmarin said that Optus had provided data to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the independent agency that deals with privacy and data issues.

After two weeks of investigation, Optus confirmed a series of numbers about the hack. Of the 9.8 million whose data were accessed; Optus believes 7.7 million do not need to replace documents. That could be because their identity document data was not collected, was not recorded properly, or is out of date and cannot be used to verify their identity.

There are another 2.1 million customers with identification numbers that potentially require replacement. Some 900,000 of those are expired, Optus believes, but may need replacement because of the practices in some states. In total, 150,000 passport numbers were affected along with 50,000 Medicare numbers, Optus confirmed.

Gates Foundation Commits $200m to Digital ID

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has renewed its commitment to digital ID, instead of second includes, put encompasses digital ID and civil registry databases.

The Foundation is topping up its investment as part of a total package of $1.27 billion in support for global health and development projects.

The announcement accompanies the sixth annual ‘Goalkeepers Report,’ which assesses progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and acknowledges that by most indicators, the world is well behind the pace needed to achieve them by 2030.

UN SDG 16.9 sets a goal of universal legal identity by 2030, including birth registration. Efforts to meet that goal have been tied to digital identity programs around the world, in large part due to the obvious impracticality of registering a billion people without ID to legacy analogue systems, and the limited value of any such system.