E-Infrastructures for Identity Management and Data Sharing: Perspectives Across the Public Sector

Abstract

The OII strategy forum 'e-Infrastructures for Identity Management and Data Sharing: Perspectives across the Public Sector' was organized to allow the UK public sector to explore how to take advantage of innovations in digital identity management and data sharing. New technologies could help public-sector organizations to identify citizens in ways that enhanced their personal privacy and built confidence in government services; to share relevant data for personalized and interconnected services and fraud reduction; and to enable authentication for different types of transactions. Could an identity infrastructure become a shared service for use across sectors, operating in a simple and secure manner and protecting the privacy of personal information? The group considered challenges from a public-sector practitioner's point of view. In education, people could have educational records accessible through digital identities tailored to that purpose. In transport, people would interact with a system that actively collected personal data (e.g., residence and banking information). The Department of Work and Pensions was working on a 'change of circumstances' mechanism to give citizens a single point of contact any time they needed to change information; customer data could help predict future outlays. Local government aimed to have a relationship with citizens, serving them in line with the democratic process as they accessed services; dynamics among government levels could be analogous to those that would apply if an international identity infrastructure emerged. In considering how common identity management solutions could be implemented across public-sector organizations to bring increased functionality, the group took up a case study on agencies involved in the death and bereavement process, which highlighted: the need for streamlining, gradations in the need for detail, differences in the need for data quality and certainty (risk management), different points of control, and legal checks on data sharing.