As 2023 continues, the European Commission appears busy developing and running pilots for its EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), which it intends to make available to all EU citizens in the near future. But while the European Commission (EC) boasts the prospective EUDI’s convenience, security, and wide range of prospective use cases in daily life, what’s less discussed is the tool’s potential for a bevy of ethical and surveillance-related issues.
What is the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI)?
The EU Digital Wallet, often referred to as the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), is slated to be offered to the European public in the years ahead. According to the European Commission,
EU Digital Identity Wallets are personal digital wallets allowing citizens to digitally identify themselves, store and manage identity data and official documents in electronic format. These may include a driving licence, medical prescriptions or education qualifications.
As legislation streamlining their slated use across Europe is finalized, the European Commission is advancing its efforts to roll out EUDIs amongst the general European public, where over 250 private corporations and public authorities are participating in four large-scale pilot projects. At the time of writing, the EU has invested €46 million into these pilots.
Indeed, a wide range of use cases are already being tested in the EUDI pilot projects. These include using the wallets to access government services, register, and activate SIM cards for mobile network services, sign contracts, facilitate travel, and present educational credentials. All together, these use cases suggest the Digital Identity Wallets’ prospective utilization across a wide range of services essential to daily life.
Convenience, But for Whom?
The European Commission frequently plays up the digital wallet’s convenience, with messaging boasting that users will be able to use the Wallets to check into hotels, file tax returns, rent cars, and securely open bank accounts. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted the following in a 2020 State of the Union address, where she proposed the concept of a “secure European e-identity:”
Every time an App or website asks us to create a new digital identity or to easily log on via a big platform, we have no idea what happens to our data in reality. That is why the Commission will propose a secure European e-identity. One that we trust and that any citizen can use anywhere in Europe to do anything from paying your taxes to renting a bicycle. A technology where we can control ourselves what data is used and how.
Certainly, von der Leyen is correct that “we have no idea what happens to our data” when we create online accounts or log in to private services, positing that Digital ID can work to solve a core problem many people have when using the internet.
But critically, the European “e-identity,” and digital identification methods generally, pose a bevy of new issues for civilians in both the short and long term. Namely, while Digital ID can provide users access to services, a 2018 WEF report on Digital ID admits the tool’s propensity to exclude; “[f]or individuals, [verifiable IDs] open up (or close off) the digital world, with its jobs, political activities, education, financial services, healthcare and more.”
And indeed, within the control of a corrupted state or other governance structures, Digital ID’s propensity to “close off” the digital world appears ripe for misuse or abuse. Researcher Eve Hayes de Kalaf, for example, writes in the Conversation that “states can weaponise internationally sponsored ID systems” against vulnerable populations. She highlights an example from the Dominican Republic, where long-term discrimination against Haitian-descended persons manifested in the stripping of their Dominican nationality in 2013, rendering them stateless.
Meanwhile, it’s not difficult to imagine others falling through the digital “cracks” as Digital ID systems become mainstream and interconnected with, if not a prerequisite for, accessing critical social and financial services and supports.
As Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal elucidate in 2021 reporting for the Grayzone, for example, the 2017 introduction of Aadhaar, India’s biometric ID system, “which tracks users’ movements between cities,” led to a spate of deaths in rural India as difficulties accessing the Aadhaar system functionally blocked goods and benefits recipients from accessing the country’s ration stores, leaving them to even starve. India’s Scroll reported that, in a random sampling of 18 villages in India where biometric authentication had been mandated to access government-subsidized food rations, 37 percent of cardholders were unable to obtain their rations.
Despite the devastation it has caused, Aadhaar has ultimately been promoted as a success, and Rest of World reports that India’s setting up international partnerships to export its popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI), an instant payment system which uses the Aadhaar biometric ID system as its base, elsewhere.
Clearly, Digital ID poses significant possible societal harms if implemented hastily. Despite these possible harms, as I note for Unlimited Hangout, a near-universal adoption of Digital ID systems increasingly appears inevitable, with “Juniper Research [estimating] that governments will have issued about 5 billion digital ID credentials by 2024, and a 2019 Goode Intelligence report [suggesting] digital identity and verification will be a $15 billion market by 2024.”
Full article: EU digital identity wallet pilots roll out under the radar