Europe’s new digital identity wallet: guarantor of digital security or backdoor to tyranny?
By David Thunder, Mercator.
Last Wednesday, Thierry Breton, EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, proudly announced on Twitter/X that he had struck a deal with MEPs to create a European “digital identity wallet”, which would permit all EU citizens to have “a secured e-identity for their lifetime”.
According to the European Commission’s own website, the European Digital Identity can be used for a whole range of transactions, including providing personal identification on and offline, showing birth certificates and medical certificates, opening a bank account, filing tax returns, applying for a university, storing a medical prescription, renting a car, or checking into a hotel.
Several people, including Dutch MEP Rob Roos, have raised concerns that a centralised digital ID could put Europeans’ privacy and mobility rights in jeopardy. A letter signed by over 500 “cybersecurity experts, researchers, and civil society organisations from across the globe” warns that the proposed digital ID regulations will reduce rather than enhance citizens’ digital security.
But one of its leading architects, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, maintains that “the wallet has the highest level of both security & privacy”, while EU President Ursula von der Leyen insists that this is “a technology where we can control ourselves what data is used and how”. So either critics are overplaying civil liberty and privacy concerns, or the technology’s defenders are downplaying them. They cannot both be right.
Leverage
In theory, a universal European digital ID could be programmed on a permanent basis in such a way that the citizen has full control over which parts of his or her “digital wallet” he shares at any given moment, and which he or she does not share. We might have little to worry about if a European digital ID was programmed now and forever by people who took privacy seriously and were not inclined to exploit the technology at their fingertips to “nudge” — or even “shove” — citizens into complying with their policies concerning disease control, non-discrimination, war propaganda, or climate change.
But in practice, it would be highly naive to assume that a programmable Europe-wide digital ID, controlled by a centralised bureaucracy would not, sooner or later, be exploited to “nudge” (or shove) people into complying with the policies that happen to be favoured by the “powers that be”. And it does not require a wild leap of imagination to envisage the sorts of ways a European digital ID could be leveraged to erode the equality and freedom of Europeans, since the very same individuals that are the public face of this digital ID initiative were the ones who set in motion the most pervasive system of bio-surveillance in the history of Europe, namely the so-called “Covid digital certificates.”
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