GOV.UK Verify — the future of digital identity?
A look at the UK Government's identity assurance platform, and what it might mean for smaller jurisdictions like Jersey.
- digital-identity
- government
GOV.UK Verify is the UK Government's identity assurance platform — a service that lets a citizen prove who they are online to a level of assurance high enough to file taxes, claim benefits, or apply for a driving licence.
In the beta phase, at least 460,000 people had registered. The architecture is unusual: rather than the government holding identity records itself, accredited private-sector providers verify the individual against multiple data sources (passports, credit history, mobile contracts) and issue an assertion the relying party can trust.
For a jurisdiction the size of Jersey, the architecture is interesting precisely because it doesn't require the state to become an identity provider in its own right. It also raises hard questions about market viability — there's a critical mass of relying services below which no provider has an incentive to certify.
This is a topic I expect to come back to.