Platformland #18

These newsletters are restarting properly now. By accident rather than design, this one’s very digital identity heavy, must be something in the water …

Platform news

• 🇺🇸 Login.gov is getting a big investment.
• 🇦🇺 Australia’s federal government has released draft legislation on digital identity. (Full PDF version here). It proposes allowing use by the private sector, as well as state & territory gov, and for non government entities to be able to issue identities. There would be a new oversight authority reappointed every 5 years that cannot be ‘directed’, to give it some distance from ministerial control. It promises some recourse role for the authority in helping the public if their identity is misused, fines for misuse of the trust mark or moving identity data outside Australia, and an Estonian style ‘dashboard’ to allow visibility over the consents they have provided. The legislation also states that UX must be ’understandable and accessible’.
• 🇬🇧 The UK’s driving licence is going digital. There’s currently vagueness about the implementation. Will it be a siloed app, or part of a digital wallet? (Driving licences being far from the only license that government issues) Will it meet emerging open data standards around digital credentials, or go bespoke?
• 🇬🇧 The UK’s Ministry of Justice has released a video showing how its Form Creator platform works.
• 🇳🇿 The New Zealand government has published research findings from their digital identity programme. Main themes were: trust and confidence (includes Māori perspective); privacy and security; ease of use; data control and minimisation.
• 🇨🇦 Back in February, Canada’s GC Notify reached Beta, having sent nearly 9 million notifications.
• 🇦🇺… while in July, Australia’s DTA shut their instance down.
• 🌍 In February, the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions started researching how to measure the carbon emissions of the X-Road platform.

🇮🇳 India has announced a Health ID number for all, along with digital health records. There’s not much included in the announcement about the digital health records, but back in May the National Health Authority was hiring people with experience of FHIR and other health standards. The Health ID can be linked to Aadhaar, but doesn’t currently have to be, although it has just been mandated for some tax refunds, following on from mandation of some state welfare programs earlier in the year.