On the 10th of July 2013 in Rome, at the beating heart of digital Europe, the GSMA participated at the second international identity conference organised by Scoping the Single European Digital Identity Community (SSEDIC). The objective of the event was to provide key stakeholders in Europe with an overview of what other programmes are doing; and see if there are areas of overlaps and potential avenues for coordination in order to build a Single European Digital Identity community.
During the event there were a number of distinguished speakers from European funded project that described their programmes and requirements for identity, including:
- STORK 2.0 “Secure idenTity acrOss boRders linKed“ – to establish interoperability of different approaches at national and EU level, eID for persons, eID for legal entities and the facility to mandate.
- epSOS “Smart Open Services for European Patients” – aims to design, build and evaluate a seamless and interoperable EU electronic health record systems by improving the quality and safety of healthcare for European citizens when travelling to another Member State.
- Future ID “Shaping the Future of Electronic Identity” – to build a comprehensive, flexible, privacy-aware and ubiquitously usable identity management infrastructure for Europe.
- eSENS “Electronic Simple European Networked Services” – a Large Scale Project launched by the European Commission to develop basic solutions for several different domains: e-Justice, Business Start-up, eHealth, eProcurement.
- Abc4Trust “Attribute-based Credentials for Trust”- to support privacy preserving technologies for identity or authentication that allow a holder to reveal just the minimal information/credentials required by the application, without giving away full identity information.
Other interventions also included lesson learned from international programmes:
- The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) highlighted the importance to set as a primary goal an identity management strategy driven by the private sector while delivering a solution that is technology feasible, socially desirable and publicly accepted.
- ITU-T emphasised the need for standardization and interoperable federated identity frameworks that use a variety of authentication methods with well understood security and privacy.
On the GSMA panel, we discussed some of the key issues and challenges pertaining to mobile identity, including the importance of the portability and security of the SIM, key differences between server based and signature based solutions, the importance of pricing and use of open standards as well as ways to remove regulatory barriers or push backs from established stakeholders such as banks or other corporations.
On the second day, several working groups sat together with the aim of providing recommendations and feedback to the work currently being carried out by the European Commission to enhance interoperability and coordination between stakeholders in Europe. Mobile Identity, authentication and liability, public private partnerships and others were themes of discussion. Over the mobile identity meeting there was consensus on the need to write essay encourage governments to invest in digital identity and – even more encouragingly – to allow mobile identity to happen before a full transition to digital identity, or even without the need for electronic national identity cards.
At the GSMA, we also believe that governments should put mobile at the centre of their digital identity plans; however, in order to achieve the greatest impact on the economy from the internet world, there a number of public policy issues that need to be addressed both in Europe and at a global level:
- Identify and assess existing legal, regulatory and policy challenges and barriers that affect the development of mobile identity services
- Leverage learning and best practise to encourage deployments and foster scale of mobile identity services like http://samedayessays.org/dissertation/ and transactions across the globe
- Engage with MNOs, policymakers and the wider ecosystem to facilitate interoperability and innovation
The GSMA Mobile identity programme is working to address these challenges and we were delighted to hear enthusiastically from the audience that GSMA is helping shaking up the digital identity community!
The GSMA Mobile Identity Programme will be addressing these and other models for partnership with government to drive the digital economy at its upcoming Global Interest Group meeting in Helsinki and Tallinn on 16th-18th September. For further information about this event, please contact Mathew Clements ([email protected]).