Verifying your identity is something we all have to do fairly regularly, but it’s about to fundamentally change after Australia passed its first legislation for a national digital ID.
The laws passed parliament in mid-May following the federal budget and will come into effect in November, although the ID itself (called myGovID) is already up and running.
So how do digital IDs work, why do we need them, and is Australia’s system actually going to be any good? This is what you need to know.
Not to be confused with digital licences – which are just a computerised version of a physical card – a digital ID is a system that allows Australians to quickly and easily identify themselves without having to provide “points” of ID to a range of organisations.
“I often talk about avoiding that painful process of collecting 100 points of ID – having to scan them, get them printed and get some undecided back of them and like exactly all of that physical paperwork and face to face interactions,” Lauren Perry, a responsible policy specialist at the UTS Human Technology Institute,
“You can get them verified once and then you’re good to go to use them online for multiple interactions.”
In essence, the digital ID acts as a go-between between the user and the organisation that wants to verify their identity.
“I use the analogy of it’s like going to the pub and someone being your wingman,” University of the Sunshine Coast computer science lecturer Dr Erica Mealy told 9news.com.au.
“It’s like setting that up through an app on your phone.
“So when you go to an organisation, you type in their number that they give you, which is registered with the government scheme, into an app that you have on your phone.
“And then it contacts that organisation through the pathway that they have approved with the government and says, ‘Yes, we’ve got Erica’s app you, I can verify this is Erica’.”
At the moment, the app that does that is the government’s myGovID, but private providers could get involved after the legislation passes.
“The thing I like about this scheme is they are talking about also having third parties involved,” Mealy says.
“If you look at someone like MasterCard or Visa, they have a vested interest in making sure that they don’t have fraud in the network.”
