D3.6: Study on ID Documents

Title: MERGENCE OF EID, INTEROPERABILITY AND PRIVACY

Scholars and professionals are more or less unified in the belief that pan-European eID interoperability from a pure technical point of view would be relatively easily achieved if wanted by the stakeholders (Cowcher 2005, Backhouse 2005, Leitold 2005, Martin 2005, Otter 2005b, Posch and Holzbach 2005). Basic legal/technical artefacts examining privacy issues are no concern either as basic agreement on human rights, data protection and privacy protection is enforced and guaranteed in all EU Member States (Bennett 1992, Bennett and Raab 1997).

In contrast to the technical level the formal notion of pan-European eID interoperability consists mainly of a legal perspective (c.f. ). This is because any integration of government systems, sharing of information and collaborative approaches have to be based on and supported by a valid legal framework. In general, government agencies should only have access to information if (1) the specific information is needed in order to complete the public assignment, (2) the gained access to the information is lawful and (3) a misuse of the access to information is highly unlikely or virtually impossible (Etzioni 1999). In the case of eID interoperability projects the formal level is represented by the legal framework in which the country is working. These legal frameworks aim to restrict the power for the purpose of protecting the citizen from government arbitrariness and ensuring their privacy (Stalder and Lyon 2002). All laws and regulations of a country are based on the country’s legal framework. This analysis is focused on six world legal systems being Civil law, Common law, Customary law, Muslim law, Talmudic law, and Mixed law systems, the latter referring not to a single system but to a combination of systems (University of Ottawa 2005).

On an informal level, the TFI model addresses socio-cultural aspects like culturally dependent differences such as meaning, intention, commitment, interpretation of law, and expectation of communication processes. In a nutshell, the model includes the “human factor” to the equation of collaborative data systems.