The project aims to provide a pathway to future digital Identity (DI) systems using digital footprints that consider trust, privacy, and security as fundamental principles.

The core idea is to apply the ‘Minimal Viable Product’ concept in the design and implementation of DI systems that harvest and leverage digital footprints. DI in this context is a digital representation of an individual that enables them to prove who they are during interactions and transactions. In place of, or supplementing a physical ID card, this exists in a digital medium (e.g., a smartphone wallet or a wearable device that contains your personal attributes). Typically, digital identities may be created from a username and password when joining digital services, but these offer no verification of the individual and can easily be spoofed or stolen. Our ambition is to go beyond this and use digital footprint data to create an ID that can be used for far spanning applications, such as verifying who you are in absence of a passport or birth certificate when wanting to access services (such as banking). This is an ambitious and novel idea, given that many digital identities (such as Twitter’s blue tick) are verified on the basis of government-issued documentation. Instead, we are aiming to do the reverse, by exploring if digital footprint data could be trustworthy enough to form a digital ID that would be considered as equally legitimate as documentation such as passports and birth certificates, and at the same time would afford an individuals’ privacy and security need. In a world which is increasingly online and works across country borders, this is what we consider to be the future of identification that is both technically robust and socially acceptable.

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