Consult Hyperion, a firm of IT management consultants, has released the findings of the latest report on Digital Identity jointly prepared with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
The report, prepared as part of a study looking at the barriers to the use of digital identity, was commissioned by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), one of the seven research institutes of the JRC based in Seville, Spain.
The objective of the study, which was performed by Consult Hyperion in cooperation with IPTS,
was to inform the policy process within the European Union on the socio-economic and technological developments taking place with respect to digital identity. To this end, the study analysed technological, economic, social and legal barriers to the EU-wide deployment of digital identity technologies, as well as their broader implications.
"Digital identity is widely considered to be a key enabling technology for successful deployment of the information society," says Dave Birch, Director, Consult Hyperion. "The world of digital identity is still in transition from the era of trials, pilots and closed systems to an era of local and national roll-out, interoperability and open systems. For the EU, there is a need to understand to what extent European integration of the identity sector has been achieved and/or is desirable in order to support this transition, and also to identify the main technical, organisational and legal barriers that may need to be overcome."
The study set out to identify these barriers clearly, and also to detail the issues at stake for Europe. As such, the study aimed to foster a deeper understanding of the challenges, opportunities, and threats in overcoming identified barriers to the EU market for e-ID from the point of view of the European policy-maker.
The project has helped to identify the most important and/or most challenging barriers to EU-wide deployment of digital identity technologies across both private and public sectors, in order to enable prioritisation and policy making. The report found that barriers typically arise at three distinct levels: individual level (most applicable at an individual or personal level), systems level (most applicable when considering systems design), and project level (most applicable to project management or project implementation).
"This study has helped us to understand the implications of greater e-ID sector integration, and to identify and analyse the barriers that have impeded this integration thus far," said Ioannis Maghiros, Principal IST Scientific Officer, European Commission – DG JRC – IPTS. "In addition, it has enabled us to rank these barriers by importance, and to identify the ease with which these obstacles can be overcome through the use of tailored EU policy options."
The study found that digital identity is best treated with a user-centric approach that embraces social, legal, technical and commercial disciplines. The need for data sharing and data protection was also raised, with special attention paid to the need to facilitate the easy flow of data, whilst at the same time safeguarding privacy.
The use of e-ID for ‘profiling’ proved to be a hotly debated topic, with a number of important privacy issues raised in terms of data protection, as well as a marked difference in various international approaches and difficulties with semantics, since the understanding of many of the terms associated with profiling varied widely across both technical and social disciplines.
The dangers of confusing identification, authentication and authorisation were also highlighted during the study. To make these distinctions more clear, the appropriate use of accepted international industry standards for e-ID โ as well as a heightened sensitivity to local cultural issues โ will need to be employed across Europe consistently, the report concluded.
The scope and detailed specification of the research into e-ID Barrier report was prepared by IPTS, and was performed by Consult Hyperion in cooperation with IPTS. The full report, as well as an Executive Summary, is now available online at www.jrc.es/publications/pub.cfm?id=1533
