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.

Spiliotopoulos, T., Sheik, A. T., Gottardello, D., & Dover, R.M. (2023),Onboarding Citizens to Digital Identity Systems. To appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy, CADE 2023, Venice, Italy.

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