Chris Yiu and Harvey Redgrave – Institute for Global Change
Digital identity (like digital voting) sounds as though it ought to be a problem with a reasonably straightforward solution, but which looks a lot more complicated when it comes to actually doing it. Like everything with the word ‘digital’ attached to it, that’s partly a problem of technical implementation. But also like everything with the word ‘digital’ attached to it, particularly in the public and political space, it’s a problem with many social aspects too.
This post makes a brave attempt at offering a solution to some of the technical challenges. But the reason why the introduction of identity cards has been highly politically contentious in the UK, but not in other countries, has a lot to do with history and politics and very little to do with technology. So better technology may indeed to be better, but that doesn’t in itself constitute a new approach to identity. Even if the better technology is in fact better (and as Paul Clarke spotted, ‘attestation’ is doing a lot more work as a word than it first appears), there are some much wider issues (some flagged by Peter Wells) which would also need to be addressed as part of an overall approach.