Trust My Data

Press release

Learn more about the progress of the second challenge of the GovTech Lab (French version).

Identified challenge

The Once Only principle, which aims not to ask the citizen for some information he or she has already provided to the state a second time, does currently not expand outside of the public sector. When it comes to use government-issued documents in the private sector, PDF and paper documents are the most widely used forms today. Some of these documents are secured by a QR code called GouvCheck, which allows to verify the authenticity of the document.

This implies that digital or physical onboarding of a customer with a service provider is generally based on physical paper or PDF documents. To process the data from these documents, the data is entered manually into an external IT system, which is a waste of time and a source of errors. Additionally, verifying the data and check the authenticity is a manual and time-consuming process, which explains why these verifications are rarely done. Solutions such as optical character recognition (OCR) exist to partially compensate for these shortcomings, but only a native digital process, with standardized and structured data would improve the user experience and increase the level of security and guarantee the authenticity of data.

It is with this in mind that several initiatives are proposing the issuance of digital attestations, as for example the revision proposed by the eIDAS regulation (see diagram in the appendix). These digital attestations present data in structured and verifiable format. This data can be read and verified by the entity to which these attestations are presented - all automatically and in real time without contacting the issuer. These digital attestations also have the advantage of allowing partial sharing of information that appears on the attestation (selective disclosure). For example, a person can share proof that they are over 18, without having to disclose their date of birth (data minimization).

In order to digitize and secure the exchange of State-certified data, the State wishes to issue verifiable digital credentials in addition to current physical paper and PDF documents. The goal is to allow a secure and interoperable exchange of structured data with automatic verification of authenticity – all relying on open standards (recognized concept of Self Sovereign Identity).

The use case chosen for this call for solutions is that of a verifiable digital residency certificate for the citizen. The same principle can be extended to any other attestations issued by the State or the private sector. The citizen must be able to store the different digital attestations in a digital wallet and present them in full or only the required elements.