EP8: A Big Little Step: Australia Shifts from Digital Identity to Digital ID

Making Data Better

Australia's online security community - government, banking, and providers - has made a major, deliberate move. Over the last year, the term "digital identity" has been replaced by "digital ID" in government and industry publications and press releases.
Steve and George unravel this deliberate linguistic shift from the amorphous 'digital identity' to the more concrete and pragmatic 'digital ID', and understand why this nuanced change is more than mere semantics. It's a shift that promises greater clarity in technology, legislation, and personal identification. Tune in and explore a future where proving who you are online is not just more secure, but refreshingly straightforward.
Why does this matter? As Steve and George discuss it in this episode of Making Data Better, it accurately shifts the focus of policy and technical work on to the quality of the data used for identification purposes. It frees everyone from the impossible tasks of representing our "identities" digitally.
Through our discussion, we celebrate the strides made by Australia in addressing the advancement of digital identity systems—a contrast to the comparatively uncoordinated, market-driven efforts seen in the U.S.
Steve and George conclude with their perspective on how to secure digital IDs using device-assisted presentation. Plaintext presentation is the enemy. It gives hackers endless opportunities to copy (via data breaches) and replay (via fraud) that data. There is a straightforward solution that we have done before: marry the cryptographic strength of how chip cards are secured to the convenience of smartphone presentation and we have the opportunity to remove breach incentive by making our digital ID data better.
There's plenty of work ahead but there's great power in what could be an uncontroversial, technically practical, achievable approach. So take a listen.