Daily Archives: June 23, 2011


2
Jerry Fishenden writes in Computer Weekly: The government’s new identity assurance strategy is a significant and welcome change of direction. Until last year, the Identity Cards Act sought to provide government with monopoly ownership of our identity. But now the Act has been repealed and proposals brought forward to let us choose our own identity provider in an open marketplace of trusted providers. In the future we could find ourselves authenticating to government services using our own choice of ID, such as a bank card or mobile phone – or perhaps even an ID issued by a “Big Society” mutual or social enterprise. This “new” approach is not in fact entirely new. The UK government tried something similar during the late 1990s, working closely with third-party ID providers such as Royal Mail, Barclays, NatWest and the British Chamber of Commerce. Citizens and businesses could use such third-party IDs to authenticate […]

Back to the future with government ID plans