The UK government are planning on introducing ‘digital ID cards’ (actually a mobile phone app). Having just read Tim Berners-Lee’s book ‘This Is For Everyone’ where he mentions he had been talking to the UK government (NHS) about the use of SOLID I was wondering if ‘digital ID cards’ were a realistic (and technically feasible) use case for SOLID. Would citizens be able to own their personal ID data and share it with those parties who need to verify their identity? Would SOLID scale to the millions of users we are talking about and would security be sufficient? Have any other countries looked at this? Any thoughts or comments would be welcome.
Just one example - the [PASS project](Solid Resources Catalog) in the U.S. aims to provide Solid management of identity and other documents for homeless people where the issue of losing physical documents is an everyday concern.
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Looking at the high level, I see 2 EU funding programs:
- ‘NLNet’ for open source: https:// nlnet.nl/project/index.html
- and ‘Sargasso’ for Digital IDs and things like this: https:// ngisargasso.eu/innovators/
NLnet funded around 24 Solid projects.
And sargasso funded around 0 Solid projects from the looks of it (or maybe Solid was used, but hidden between these buzzword titles: AI Digital ID, post-Quantum Digital ID, decentralized digital ID, blockchain digital ID… One would need to look to project descriptions to find out, there are around 60 projects).
Maybe there is a reason for that, why Solid is not funded for digital IDs, but funded by another program for open source.
(Both programs are available from citizens of other countries outside EU. Sargasso especially has a requirement for collaboration with other countries outside EU)
Digital IDs is very widespread program across governments: everyone is doing this now.
But Digital IDs and other surveillance systems is a huge privacy concern when we look to the whole picture how governments are pushing these things onto people. For example, some recent video I discovered where Tony Blair (Former UK prime minister from Labour party) and Larry Ellison (Oligarch) talking about total surveillance with AI as a new form of governance, clips taken from “world governments summit 2025” in United Arab Emirates: Reddit - The heart of the internet But that is no democracy. There is alternative: projects like Solid (maybe?) or https://www.reclaimcontrol.tech/
Thanks for this info. Yes, I too saw the comments from Ellison about surveillance state. Worrying that the Tony Blair Institute gets a lot of funding from Ellison. See for example: 'WHAT WILL JESUS SAY?': TONY BLAIR, BIG TECH AND THE ISRAEL CONNECTION
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Thanks Jeff, will take a look at those resources. I know that digital IDs are definitely becoming more of a thing. I worry however that we are building a system that if autocrats (like Trump) could ever get control of would turn us into even more of a surveillance state.
Yes, I totally agree on the potential dangers of digital IDs. That’s why a Solid approach is necessary. I should clarify that PASS is not about digital IDs in the sense of a single government-issued ID, rather as a way to store identity documents in a digital wallet.