One of the more interesting breakout workstreams was on ‘the trust cluster’ – which unfortunately was not the one I was in.  I did though have a very interesting conversation with one of the presenters in that group. Malcolm Crompton, who was until recently Australia’s privacy commissioner and is now the MD of an outfit called Information Integrity Solutions.

Malcolm’s paper for the summit is well worth looking at, both for its content and for its comprehensive links to other sources. His argument is that ‘With care, vigorous debate, and a lot of hard work, we will still have private lives in 20 years from now and inconceivably good government services.’

One of the things Malcolm is currently working on is setting up a private sector provided identity management arrangement for Australia through the banks which draws on the BankID system developed in Sweden.  they in turn describe what they are doing as:

The Swedish Government has embarked on a programme to support the development of so-called “24 -hour authorities�, and is working with its own departments, municipalities and other authorities to facilitate the introduction of this service. This service generally presupposes a secure electronic identification and signature system, such as that offered by BankID.

For example, Rikskatteverket (The National Tax Board) and Riksförsäkringsverket (The National Social Insurance Board) websites are now fully operational, and both offer their customers access to BankID.

There is increasing interest in the facilities offered by the BankID concept and provided via the member banks.

Members of the public can identify themselves and sign documents from authorities, companies and other organisations on the Internet by using BankID’s electronic identification and signature system, the customer’s identification having been previously guaranteed by the member bank.

Authorities, companies and other organisations can check the customer’s identity and signature by using computer software developed by a specialist company working in conjunction with the member bank.