Editorial

Help us shape the next Think Digital Identity For Government conference agenda

Delegates are telling us they want more details on third party ID issues, legal and vendor partnership aspects of Digital Identity. Disagree? well, maybe you should put your vote in for what YOU want to see next June

Posted 13 December 2018 by Gary Flood


Doors closed on a very successful Think Digital Identity For Government on November 29th – the second of 2018.

As you will now know, in the basis of the great success of the two shows, we have decided to mount a third in this series – the only show that looks at the public sector side of Digital Identity in the UK.

Scheduled for Friday, June 7th, 2019 – and already open for registration to secure your place, which is FREE if you are a qualifying professional in the public sector –  we are, Xmas notwithstanding, already hard at work creating another day of compelling content on the post-GOV UK Verify UK Digital ID landscape.

But – are we being too hasty? Are there issues that we DON’T know you care about?

To check, here are a selected few of the messages we have received back from delegates: do they chime with your experience of the show?

A great conference. What would be interesting for a future event would be some examples where government service customers had difficulty in establishing identity online and how these issues were resolved. – Senior Civil Servant, Department of Employment Affairs & Social Protection

It would be interesting to understand how Digital Identity affects what data companies can keep about an individual. e.g, if I have signed up to some sort of identity ‘account’ where I control who has access to what, then how much information is the 3rd party I am consuming a product from allowed to keep?

I understand the likes of Microsoft and Mastercard are joining forces to look at digital identity [a story we covered this week – LINK], so how would this work for gov.uk going forward? Might this end up as a 2-tier system, where UK citizens need both a gov.uk sanctioned digital identity, but might also have a ‘global giant’ identity? And what if the global giant is Chinese or Russian, or even American?

For future conferences, I’d like to hear more about the legal side – not so much GDPR, but issues around ownership, responsibility and liability. I’d also like some clarity (dare I say, certainty?!) around GOV.UK Verify. 

One unanswered question for me was around the approach government should take to identity. There seemed to be an inability to agree on whether there should be a single identity service, agreed standards or individual departments going their own way to suit their needs.

Some fascinating stuff there – but does it capture everything that needs to be discussed when it comes to this vitally important technology?

Please add you voice to the debate by dropping a line to our Director, Matt Stanley, matt.stanley@thinkdigitalpartners.com, who is working already on the agenda for June.

Thanks so much for your help – we really appreciate it.