Bart Custers in Trouw about new European digital identity
Europe is working full steam towards a digital identity for every EU citizen. And although it might be really useful to be able to hire a car everywhere in the EU with no hassles, Bart Custers, Professor of Law and Data Science at eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies, sees many loose ends. He wrote about the issue in an extensive essay that was published in Dutch weekend magazine Trouw Tijdgeest on 9 July 2022.
When doing transactions on internet, it’s important to know who you’re doing business with. Otherwise citizens and businesses risk financial problems. If the risks are too great and certainties too small, people would rather not do the transaction. If that occurs on a large scale, it will hinder the growth of the economy within the European Union. With this idea in mind, every EU citizen will soon have a European digital identity, if it’s up to the European Commission. These plans go a lot further than the current DigID: the new European Digital Identity Wallet (unfortunately, there’s no Dutch name yet) should be much more widely usable, across national borders. It can also be used for government communication, but it is mainly intended for citizens and businesses. In his essay, Custers discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these plans and sets out what still needs to be done before this system can be introduced throughout Europe.