Governments get together
At the end of last month, eema's two day European e-ID card conference created a real buzz. With over 80 people in attendance and 21 speakers, this was a great opportunity to cover the waterfront in terms of what is happening - and interestingly what is not happening - in terms of national electronic identity cards across Europe from Estonia to Italy, from Austria to Belgium.
Key presenters were Reinhard Posch, CIO from Digital Austria (Austria are the current holders of the EU presidency) and Katherine Courtney from the UK Home Office who emphasised the need to strike the right balance between the citizen and the state. This is of course in all transactions and harks back to the musings of Plato, but it is a particularly sensitive issue at the moment especially with respect to personal digital identity.
What is about to have a major impact on the citizens of Europe and their digital interactions was revealed in the projection from the estimated 10 million users today, mainly in Austria, Belgium, Estonia and Italy to a projected 300 million e-IDs issued by 2015 including the mandated use by 50 million UK citizens in 2013.
However a fascinating couterpoint to this was the revelation that many of these card systems are not interoperable! Hence eema is proposing to host an e-ID card interoperability challenge at this summer's eema conference in Barcelona on 15-16 June. Should be worth going to!
- Posted by davidg on 13/03/2006.
- davidg's site
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