Submitted by Anonymous on
Author: Javier Salazar. Digital Strategy Project Manager
CEF European funded project “Leveraging eID in the Private Sector” (a.k.a. LEPS) envision innovative private services (ATHEX, Correos, ELTA) to integrate with the eIDAS nodes, as a way to make trusted electronic services access available across Europe to any citizen.
Nowadays, each one of us has dozens of digital identities around, if not counting the hundreds that are unknown to even ourselves. “Identity managers” and common digital European identities are demanded, but still current identities, such as Google or Facebook aren’t as trusted as would be necessary to any legal or formal task. This problem is shown by the fact that 24% of banks find it difficult to verify the identity of their customer when delivering digital banking services. Problem was raised long ago, and keeps in the news as we saw recently Facebook guru’s Mark Zuckerberg was among the people whose information was improperly acquired by Cambridge Analytica.
Despite security breaches that can happen to any company, is well known that most private companies benefit from data selling. This practice is still to be better regulated and assessed by governments. Meanwhile, citizens live in a time of uncertainty and decentralization of identities (when talking about highly private or governmental tasks).
New regulations like eIDAS and GDPR try to solve all these trust problems, aligning rules with government's requirements. In these days, businesses are facing with the need to build mechanisms to provide trusted identities. These mechanisms necessarily take into account: user experience or trendily used now: UX, new legislations mentioned before and government’s interests.
Therefore Correos launched Correos ID, a digital service that, based on a trusted and verified digital identity is provided by Correos (Spanish Postal Service). Moreover, it allows Spanish citizens to access any due service, in compliance with the highest standards of security and without duplicating information.
As a public company, Correos seeks implementation of services that can be of interest for citizens but also of use for government agencies. Likewise, as designated postal service for the last 300 years, it has protected customer’s privacy ever since then, and will keep doing it in the digital era.
Pioneering as Spanish side of the pilots in LEPS sustains its aim of continuous innovation and common European digital market. Pilot integration will mean digital services from Correos will be accessible through eIDAS nodes identification, allowing EU citizens to access their services. Such integration reinforces trust in Correos, as well as populates EU private services available within the eIDAS nodes. Such nodes have been implemented by those countries that already joined the effort of creating a European Digital Single Market.
Currently, the project is on implementation phase and has already integrated most of the pieces, however a great amount of technical and non-technical work has to be done to ensure and test EU electronic identities usage for private services.
