As society becomes more and more digital, hundreds of thousands of individuals end up in digital exclusion. There was a time when you could choose to do things the traditional way or digitally, but now doors to the non-digital alternatives are closing ever faster. We must all help to minimise the digital exclusion of these individuals. Freja eID is contributing with an innovation that solves one of the biggest problems – access to electronic identification for everyone.
One of the reasons why people become excluded from the digital world is that they cannot, do not want or dare not to use an e-ID. This includes many elderly people and individuals with special needs.
As e-ID becomes a requirement for accessing both private and public e-services, these people end up further and further away from being able to interact with the digital world. For a country that is a world leader in many respects when it comes to digitalisation, this is not good enough.
We decided to do something about the problem
Freja eID was founded on the philosophy of creating an e-ID for everyone. We thought it was unreasonable to need to be a customer of a certain bank to be able to access public sector services and we also saw the need for an e-ID that was much more transparent than existing solutions, for example by showing transaction history, always showing the user what data they are sharing and the ability to deactivate their e-ID for the services they do not use.
e-ID with shared control
In the work of establishing Freja eID among municipalities, authorities, companies – and not least users – it was clear to us that there was still a large group of individuals we could not help. And it was precisely the individuals described above – who cannot, do not want or dare not to use an e-ID on their own.
We saw that a solution to this could be an e-ID with shared control. How this works, for example, is if your father, due to old age, experiences great uncertainty when paying bills online and is at high risk of a fraudster tricking him into approving an incorrect payment with his e-ID. If you could co-sign his transactions with your own e-ID, you could verify that he only approves correct transactions.
Innovation grant from the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS)
We presented “E-ID with shared control” in PTS’s innovation competition “From outside to the internet” and out of 116 submitted proposals, ours became one of eight that received funding. This enables us to launch this solution more quickly and thus offer a big step away from the digital exclusion for hundreds of thousands of individuals – and to get one step closer to our vision of an e-ID for everyone.
“E-ID with shared control” is expected to be launched during the first half of 2021.
