Online accounts could be suitable evidence for digital identity – report

The research was carried out with six partners, including the Government Digital Service and Veridu, and assessed whether social networks and online accounts would be suitable evidence when creating a digital identity, such as the government’s GOV.UK Verify.

The OIX research involved 12 face-to-face interviews with users followed by a round of internal testing by 86 participants of a gateway that was developed by Veridu specifically for the project.

The idea behind the research is to increase the number of people who are able to register for such services. The government wants to see 90% of people who need to use GOV.UK Verify being able to by the end of the year.

Most people (36%) in the first round of testing chose PayPal as their first option to verify their online activity, which the report suggests could be due to its association with banking and the fact it doesn’t contain social data.

The report said that Facebook drew out the most emotive response, with many saying they would not want the government or the third part company carrying out the tests having access to the information in their Facebook accounts. Despite this, 18% of testers chose Facebook as their first choice, which the report said could be because people are often continuously logged-in to the site as well as the use of Facebook Connect to log in to other services.

LinkedIn was the most popular second choice, 30% of all second choices, which the report said might be because it has limited personal data and is seen as storing work information. Meanwhile, Twitter and Dropbox were not chosen by any users.

In the second phase of the research, 86 subjects used a test system developed by Veridu to see whether such online accounts could be used to verify identities.

The pass rate for the 180-day activity threshold, which is the standard required by GOV.UK Verify, was 82%, while the 360-day pass-rate was 60%.

The OIX report recommended that Veridu work with certified companies to develop the test so that it satisfies government verification standards and can be scaled up.