The future of identity in the information society

Abstract

Digitising personal information is changing our ways of identifying persons and managing relations, e.g. over the Internet. What used to be a "natural" identity, e.g. the personal appearance of an individual at a counter, is now as virtual as a user account at a web portal, an email address, or a mobile phone number. It is subject to diverse forms of identity management in business, administration, and among citizens. Core question and source of conflict is who owns how much identity information of whom and who needs to place trust into which identity information to allow access to resources. This book presents answers from the EU funded research project FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society), a multidisciplinary endeavor of 24 leading institutions from research, government, and industry. Research from states with different cultures on e.g. the identification of citizens and ID cards is combined towards a well-founded analysis of HighTechIDs and Virtual Identities, considering aspects, such as privacy, mobility, interoperability, profiling, forensics, and identity related crime. "FIDIS has put Europe on the global map as a place for high quality identity management research." -Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission, Responsible for Information Society and Media. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.