2020: And Still No Digital Citizen ID System?

Well, 2020 was a big target for many countries … with transformations in health, education, energy, governance, e-commerce, and so on. But we are now in 2020 and lack many of the digital building blocks that could be used to take our world out of the 20th Century.

As every day, every month and every year that passes, the governments of the world that fail to provide proper citizen-focused digital ID and signing infrastructure, will fall further behind others in the world who have adopted it. Basically all the data that exists within most government systems should be deprecated … aged-out … as it cannot be trusted. A new architecture is required, and trusted digital IDs and digital signing must be at the core of this.

The era of the wet signature has gone, as it has almost zero credibility in this information age.

The era of the pseudo ID has gone, too, as there is virtually no credibility in it. We give people numbers, as that is the way we have done it for centuries. To the UK government, I am a health ID, a tax ID, a NI ID, and so on. We are just a number to them, and that is how it has been for centuries. When required we create a scrawl, and that scrawl identifies us to them. In terms of a true digital ID - and something I can truly prove myself - I am almost non-existent. I am only a login ID and a password…