What is digital ID?

Digital ID can form the foundation of a host of applications in many aspects of an individual’s life, work, and social interactions.

Unlike a paper-based ID such as most driver’s licenses and passports, a digital ID is a form of identification that can be authenticated remotely over digital channels. A digital ID could be issued by a national or local government, by a consortium of private or nonprofit organizations, or by an individual entity. What’s more, a digital ID can use a variety of technologies to perform digital authentication, ranging from the use of biometric data to passwords, PINs, or smart devices and security tokens.

But what does it mean to have “good” digital ID? In short, good digital ID requires these four attributes:

High-assurance digital ID meets both government and private-sector institutions’ standards for initial registration and subsequent acceptance for a multitude of important civic and economic uses, such as gaining access to education, opening a bank account, and establishing credentials for a job. High-assurance authentication maintains these same standards each time the digital ID is authenticated. This attribute does not rely on any particular underlying technology. A range of credentials could be used to achieve unique high assurance authentication and verification, including biometrics, passwords, QR codes, and smart devices with identity information embedded in them. [1]

With a unique digital ID, an individual has only one identity within a system, and every system identity corresponds to only one individual. This is not characteristic of most social media identities today, for example.

Consent means that individuals knowingly register for and use the digital ID with knowledge of what personal data will be captured and how they will be used.

Good digital ID has built-in safeguards to ensure privacy and security while also giving users access to their personal data, decision rights over who has access to that data, with transparency into who has accessed it.

For example, a government might misuse digital ID programs by deploying them for political and social control, while a private-sector firm might misuse digital ID for commercial gain by influencing consumers in ways that they do not understand or desire. The nature of this trade-off for information technology broadly is explored in a range of academic literature.

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