After the majority of the Canadians and their business moved online during the pandemic, people realized how important it is to safely complete transactions online, here’s where the Digital ID comes into the picture
A survey from the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) has shown that almost three-quarters of the population believe that it’s important for the government the move quickly and enable digital IDs.
So How will Digital IDs work?
Digital IDs will be used to authenticate its user by reading a digital certificate, and then referencing it with something else, like a picture or a fingerprint. It’s a convenient and an easy identification method that’s made with the security and encryption needed to securely complete transactions and access services online.
The process of creating a trusted digital ID would generally follow these steps:
- Capture attributes like ID documents or biometrics.
- Verify the authenticity of the documents and the person presenting them using either a 3rd party or with biometrics.
- It would also contain a public key, that is confirmed to ensure it belongs to the specific individual.
- The holder can then scan or tap the digital ID on the verifiers reader.
The Government of Ontario says it is currently considering include the Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0 for data modeling, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 for key management, JSON-LD 1.1 for data formatting, OpenID Connect as identity standard, BBS+ Signatures 2020 and Ed25519 Signature 2020 for signature format, Self-Issued OpenID Provider v2 and more for interoperability.
The Associate Minister of Digital Government mentioned that “Openly sharing our technology approach to digital identity is an essential step in our plan to provide more convenient, private and secure ways to prove who you are.”
So, when should you expect to get your own digital ID?
The Ontario government has consulted with more than 68 organizations, more than 100 industry experts on the tech standards and protocols to follow when issuing digital IDs, and citizens of Ontario should expect it to be fully launched by the end of this fall!
Some are still skeptical about the security of these new digital IDs, but the government is definitely going to place appropriate legal, privacy and security measures before fully launching digital IDs. This is a huge step in taking the world as we know it even deeper into its digital existence and possibly expedited by recent occurrences in the world (i.e. Covid) which makes a touchless, paperless world seem safer. How do you feel about this shift?
