Why a European digital identity is important
Digital identity is now essential to exercise rights, access public and private services and participate in the digital economy. The European Digital Identity Wallet will allow citizens to identify themselves and provide personal data in a secure and recognised way throughout the European Union, both to administrations and companies. The potential benefits are clear:
More efficiency. Today, each person manages on average more than 100 digital identities, most of them in the private sector. The European wallet will allow the use of a single identification mechanism for everything: administrations, banking, e-commerce, telecommunications, insurance or digital platforms.
More security. The wallet allows you to replace the username and password, today the main gateway for identity theft, with a cryptographic identification linked to the device and the person, much more difficult to steal or deceive with phishing techniques.
More confidence and control. The use of the digital wallet is voluntary and people will only adopt the wallet if they are certain that they maintain control over their data. For this reason, the European framework establishes that each organization can only access the information strictly necessary to provide a service, in accordance with the principles of data minimization, selective disclosure and privacy by design.
In short, the European digital identity is much more than a new technology: it is the opportunity to build a European space of digital trust, with more guarantees for people, fewer passwords and a simpler and more secure digital experience.
Willingness to collaborate with the State to guarantee successful deployment
The Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service has submitted for public information, for urgent processing, the draft royal decree that will regulate the ecosystem of the European Digital Identity Wallet in Spain. The Generalitat de Catalunya, with the support of the AOC, has presented contributions with a constructive purpose: to strengthen the model and make the most of the public infrastructures of trusted digital services that are already operating in Catalonia.
This collaboration is not new. For years, the AOC has acted as a technical interlocutor between the Catalan administrations and the General State Administration to deploy services such as Cl@ve, electronic invoicing, the interconnection of registers, data interoperability, the citizen folder or electronic notifications. Experience shows that, in this way, complex digital services are deployed faster, more homogeneously and at lower cost. We believe that this same approach is key to the success of the European portfolio. The portfolio will be more useful the more services, administrations and information sources it can integrate from day one.
Our proposal is clear: add capabilities, avoid duplication and reuse what already works, to deploy the European portfolio more quickly, reach more people and offer real value to citizens, companies and public administrations.
Proposals for improving the draft royal decree
With the desire to contribute to a more open, interoperable and useful ecosystem for citizens, the Generalitat de Catalunya, with the support of the AOC, is putting forward several proposals for improvement.
1. Open the ecosystem to different portfolio models
Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 (eIDAS2) provides for three modalities of provision of cardseres: that offered directly by the State, that offered by an entity under its mandate and that recognized by the State. The project only develops the first. We consider it appropriate that state regulations develop objective and transparent procedures so that other charterseres can be recognized, certified and communicated to the European Commission, thus expanding the options available within the ecosystem.
2. Recognize trusted public providers
Qualified public providers of trusted services have proven experience, infrastructure and operational capacity. Their incorporation as providers of personal identification data would allow them to take advantage of an already deployed network and facilitate citizens' access to new digital services.
3. Promote a federated registry of user parties (administrations)
The user parties are the entities, public or private, that will accept the wallet to identify people and verify their data. A federated registration model would facilitate the incorporation of public administrations into the system and simplify the administrative procedures associated with the deployment of the digital wallet.
4. Incorporate authentic regional and local sources
The services most used by citizens often depend on information sources managed by regional and local administrations. That is why it is important that these sources can be integrated quickly into the ecosystem catalog and provide immediate value to the portfolio.
5. Strengthen the role of interoperability nodes
Interoperability nodes already connect administrations and information sources securely. Their participation in the verification and exchange of attributes would help simplify deployment and ensure the coherence of the ecosystem.
6. Avoid additional requirements not provided for by the European Regulation
To promote efficient deployment, we consider it appropriate to avoid additional burdens that are not foreseen in the European framework and maintain alignment with the eIDAS2 Regulation.
7. Reuse existing public infrastructure
The existence of platforms, trusted providers and shared services already operational allows for reducing duplication, accelerating deployment and optimizing public investment.
8. Strengthen governance and inter-administrative coordination
Coordination through existing cooperation bodies, especially the Sectoral Commission for Electronic Administration, would facilitate a coherent and aligned implementation among all public administrations.
What will a Catalan administration have to do with the digital wallet?
The aim of the AOC is that Catalan administrations do not have to do anything, or almost nothing. For citizens, the European wallet will be another identification mechanism, which will appear automatically, without any additional integration, in VALID, the common identification service of Catalan public services.
For administrations, there will be a registration process as a user party in the State registry to be able to use the portfolio. The AOC's intention is to carry out this registration on behalf of all Catalan administrations, as it has already done with other state systems. That is why we advocate a federated registry of user parties (proposal 3).
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