Summary

Digital Identity (DI) technologies provide citizens with easy, efficient, privacy-preserving, and secure access to services. This, in turn, allows governments and businesses to innovate, streamline their services, comply with regulations, and compete at the international level. Governments have already begun planning and implementing DI programmes to provide legal digital identities to citizens. The UK government has taken a large step in this direction by publishing a beta version of the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework, a set of rules and standards designed to establish trust in DI products in the UK.

However, lack of access to DIs can limit these benefits, while unequal access can lead to uneven distribution of these benefits across social groups and escalate existing tensions. To increase adoption, and do so in a fair and equitable manner, this project aims to investigate the potential of physical locations for citizen onboarding to DI systems in the UK context and establish appropriate requirements and guidelines for their development and use. Such physical locations can provide convenience and accessibility for users, particularly in marginalised communities, and improve the efficiency of the DI onboarding process with additional services such as document verification, biometric capture, and identity document scanning.

Objectives

Our specific Research Objectives (ROs) are the following:

RO1. Identify key drivers shaping the DI onboarding operational environment and key action points to proactively shape desirable futures.

RO2. Investigate current research and implementation trends and opportunities in DIs with a focus on the onboarding process, as reported in the academic and grey literature.

RO3. Understand stakeholder and end-user perceptions and attitudes towards DI systems, with a focus on inclusive onboarding.

RO4. Determine the best methods, practices, and approaches for identifying and assessing security threats and evaluating the associated risks for inclusivity in future digital identity onboarding systems.

Changes to the project objectives as the project progressed:

In RO2, we decided to focus our analysis of the literature to published academic literature and exclude unpublished work and grey literature. The reason for this is that grey literature typically lacks usable metadata to inform the bibliometric analysis conducted.

Analysis of grey literature is left as complementary future work of a more critical nature, such as a systematic review of the evidence in the literature.

In RO3, we decided to focus the semi-structured interviews on end users, rather than other stakeholders. This allowed us to have a clearer focus in our end user interviews. Furthermore, we felt that some of the stakeholder assessments and attitudes were also elicited during the horizon scan.

As a more general comment on the overall aim of the project, we slightly expanded our focus from the study of a physical location (‘Experience Centre’) to include the onboarding process more generally, in order for our findings to be more widely applicable. In addition, an increased focus on the societal impacts of (the adoption of) DIs came as a logical consequence of the research as the project progressed.

Activities

The project comprised four research activities.

1.  A horizon scan focusing on the DI onboarding process. This activity identified and analysed emerging trends (be they weak or strong signals), technologies, challenges, and opportunities in a five-year time-horizon using a ‘key drivers’ and PESTEL (political, economic, societal, technological, environmental and legal) framework.

2. A bibliometric analysis of the literature in the area of DIs. The bibliometric analysis examined how the concept of digital identity has been reported in the academic literature in the last 20 years, identified shifts on trending topics and keywords used over time, mapped the themes present in the literature, and uncovered nuances of international foci and collaborations over time.

3. Semi-structured interviews. The interviews focused on marginalised end-user populations and provided an in-depth understanding of their attitudes and opinions around DI technologies.

4. Threat and risk assessment. This activity involved a comprehensive examination of both the users and the DI system for potential threats and a subsequent evaluation of the associated security risks.

Outputs

• Presentation on the SMOOTH project from the SPRITE+ Conference, June 2023.

• T. Spiliotopoulos, A. T. Sheik, D. Gottardello and R. Dover, “Onboarding citizens to digital identity systems,” International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy (CADE 2023), Hybrid Conference, Venice, Italy, 2023, pp. 77-81, DOI: 10.1049/icp.2023.2575.

• Talk titled “Human-Centred Design of Digital Identities” by Tasos Spiliotopoulos at the Human-Centred Computing seminar at the University of Birmingham, February 2023.

• Talk titled “Smoothing the Digital Identity Onboarding Process” by Tasos Spiliotopoulos at the SPRITE+ Conference in Belfast, June 2023.

• Presentation at the SPRITE+ 2024 Showcase:

Impact

Our work provides an improved understanding of Digital Identity technologies in a manner that can be useful for informing the onboarding process for citizens. In particular, we examined past and current research via bibliometric analysis, we presented possible futures via horizon scanning, we focused on marginalised populations using qualitative methods, and we investigated the security aspects of DI onboarding via formal threat and risk assessment.

While this work has a focus on where the physical onboarding of digital identities will occur, the findings seek to inform DI adoption activities beyond what can take place at an Experience Centre. In particular, our findings are helpful to stakeholders tasked with designing, developing and operating the infrastructure for supporting DIs in the UK.

In addition to the technical considerations, our work has the potential to inform user awareness and engagement activities around the public adoption of DIs, as well as policy making and regulation, especially as they concern marginalised populations. Individual researchers and other relevant stakeholders who are interested in the societal impacts of technology will also benefit from this work.

Further work

We are currently engaged in consolidating our findings and preparing submissions for peer-reviewed outlets. In this initial phase, these are based on the individual project activities. In addition, we aim to further explore the links among the different activities with the goal of providing a more comprehensive, multidisciplinary understanding of DI adoption.

We also aim to seek further funding to explore important threads identified in this project. These areas include (i) the use of physical locations for DI onboarding, (ii) the user-centred design of DI solutions, and (iii) the societal impacts of DI technologies.