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Postcard from Berlin | June Newsletter
Kia ora,
Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to be personally invited by Joerg Resch to attend Europe’s flagship digital ID conference in Berlin, EIC 2024. For someone who regularly spoke on this circuit for over 10 years, it was a blast to be back, revelling in the richness of the presentations and discussion, highlighted in this post by my predecessor at the Kantara Initiative. The brain is fully engaged for hours, absorbing expert insight, experience, and innovation that is found here at EIC in Germany and Identiverse in the US, the world’s two biggest conferences in this space. I’m looking forward to a tiny fraction of the ground being covered and contextualised locally at our Digital Trust Hui Taumata in just six weeks’ time.
The pre-conference SIDIHub made significant progress in the challenging goal to achieve digital identity cross border interoperability. Participants were interested in learning about Aotearoa becoming the first common law country to implement a regulated digital identity trust framework on July 1st. This framework regulates stakeholders that opt in for accreditation, thereby increasing customer trust in their security and privacy settings. The US, UK, Canada, and Australia have digital ID trust frameworks in operation and piloted, but not yet nationally legislated. Credential authentication and verification continue to evolve both in policy and technology at different speeds, making it a complex issue.
At our recent DIA-hosted public/private sector working group meeting on digital identification standards, I commented that there is still much work needed globally before we can adopt comprehensive policies, protocols and standards for decentralised digital ID and its containerwallets. This is a plane we will continue to build as we fly it.
The high interest in digital ID led us to host/co-host two events in June: the capacity-filled ‘Digital Identity, Higher Education, Aotearoa’ sponsored by Middleware and featuring the University of Auckland, and a Town Hall-styled session on digital cash with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Te Pūtea Matua (RBNZ), in partnership with FinTechNZ. Both events showed how important broad digital trust is for ensuring cybersecurity and protecting against deepfakes, scams and hacking threats. Awareness and education are essential, so we thank our members for supporting DINZ initiatives, just as DINZ supports members’ initiatives like the upcoming series from NEC.
And finally, the DIA has released a new schedule of Identification Masterclasses through to August.
To register for any of the Zoom sessions, please email identity@dia.govt.nz with the G or HD reference number and a Zoom link will be supplied.
Ngā mihi
Colin Wallis
Executive Director, Digital Identity NZ
Read full news here: Postcard from Berlin | June Newsletter
