We’re delighted to announce five new projects, funded from the SPRITE+ Phase 1 Research Fund. The projects were developed and chosen at our third research sandpit, held in Cheshire in January 2023, and each focuses on a different aspect of the sandpit challenge: “Future Digital identity: Created, Remembered, Forgotten”. Over a series of online and in person sessions, sandpit participants worked together to develop interdisciplinary, multi-institution, cross-sector research proposals from scratch.

The funded projects explore medium to long term aspects of security, privacy, identity, and trust. In a future where a digital identity could become the gateway to all government services, Smoothing the Digital Identity Onboarding Process investigates how to ensure that access to digital identity systems is fair and equitable, and explores the potential of a physical location for citizen onboarding. The team behind Minimal Viable Digital Identity ask if digital footprint data could one day be trustworthy enough to form a digital ID that is as robust and legitimate as formal government documentation such as passports and birth certificates.

Changes in how people present themselves online is the focus of Digital Identity and Life-Course Study ('DIALCS'). The project will lay the theoretical and methodological groundwork for a potential future project that would seek to understand how people integrate DI technologies into their daily online experience, and more specifically how DI technologies support or suppress types of online behaviour. Meanwhile, the Trust, Rights, and Identity in the Metaverse ('TRIM')project seeks to understand how individuals’ identities in the Metaverse might be exploited for harm, and how human rights in the Metaverse might be preserved, including protection against discrimination/harm on the basis of someone’s identity/identity expression.

Finally, Digital Product Passports (‘DigiProPass’): Unintended Consequences for Human Digital Identity addresses security and ethical implications of the rollout of digital product passports, digital records for physical products, designed to track how and where products are used as they move through the economy (including electric vehicle batteries and consumer electronics).

Congratulations to all the teams! Learn how these projects were developed and chosen here.