Title: IDENTITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: GENERAL PRESENTATION

Identity Management System: General Presentation

Identity Management Systems (IMS) are considered to be the citizen’s gateway to the Information Society. Because of the growing number of services, IMS could even be presented as a critical tool for the citizen. Its utility as an almost unique access tool to many enhanced facilities of the Information Society will make it the “electronic” witness of a great part of the citizen’s online life. An IMS will have to comply with the regulatory framework concerning the protection of the user privacy rights. Indeed, the acceptance of such systems will be based not only on their usability or ease of use but also on their effectiveness in respecting and preserving the privacy of their users. 

IMS should enable the citizen to keep control or at least be aware (depending on the situation) of the nature and amount of personal data released. The most valuable IMS will be the one that allows multipurpose usage in order to preserve the privacy level of the user, while enabling multilateral and multi-channel security requirements. 

Three of the main advantages of IMS are that they will: 

1. Enable new services: for example, they will allow a citizen to go to a single web site for (a) their health care needs, such as viewing their medical records, (b) paying doctors bills and (c) ordering drugs from the pharmacy. This example which illustrates the concept of “web services” shows the implication of the requirement to grant to several actors in the delivery chain different levels of access to a user’s personal data.

2. Reduce the level of risk, and thus create a trustworthy environment: in the digital world, identity is easy to fake. Indeed this environment is characterised by three enabling dimensions: (a) the ability to produce endlessly exact or true copies of information; (b) technologies that tend to facilitate the flow of personal information; and (c) cyber criminals who use exact copies of personal information to pretend they are someone else, thus effectively stealing someone else’s identity. IMS will help guard the flow of personal information as well as impose authentication procedures to identify fake copies.

3. Help find an acceptable balance between privacy and security needs: IMS will have to simultaneously (a) communicate the required personal data only and (b) respect the legal framework in which this service takes place by, for example respecting the requirements of law or taxation authorities.