Inclusion starts with "I": Taking responsibility for overcoming blindspots in digital identity [Introductory]

Yeah, hi everyone and thank you for making it to our session here in the dungeons at 4.15. We appreciate your commitment and our talk, yeah, as you already said, Inclusion starts with I, taking responsibility for overcoming blind spots in digital identity. I'm Thea and I'm Chris and we are both part of the interdisciplinary team that is currently developing the German National EUDI Wallet. So to set the scene, let's start with a big picture.

In 2021, the European Commission proposed to revise the EIDAS regulation, so the EU's digital identity trust framework, and that amendment came with a big vision. By 2030, 80% of the people living in the European Union should be able to use a digital ID solution to access key public services. And with the implementation, the launch of the first iterations of the wallet only a few months, six months away, it's of course an important milestone that is coming up for this vision. In Germany, unfortunately, the baseline that we're starting from is quite sobering.

Only one in five people who are in possession of a national identity card, the Personalausweis in Germany, only one in five people who has this identity card with an EID function has actively used it once so far. So this is our baseline and to hopefully see an improvement with the launch of the EUDI Wallet.

This is one of the reasons why Germany has decided to develop the EUDI Wallet through an open architecture and consultation process to involve stakeholders as early as possible in the development process and through that process to foster engagement, to build trust and hopefully gain better acceptance of the solution that we are developing. So the usage numbers that I was just talking about, we don't see them as just statistics. We understand them as design signals.

They show us that so far the existing infrastructure, EID infrastructure in Germany has not worked equally well for everyone living in Germany. So if we want to make sure that we do not reproduce these gaps, these challenges in inclusion, we have to start doing things differently. In other words, our key message today, inclusion cannot be an afterthought, it cannot be an add-on, it really is the condition for success. If you know me, you know that I have a background in research, so forgive me for being a bit conceptual here.

But when we talk about inclusion, we really need to be precise about what we mean because inclusion can fail into two directions. On the one end of the spectrum, you have under-identification. Think about digital identity systems that render certain people invisible, where certain people have not access to public services or other services, are not recognized, are not able to fully participate in society. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have over-identification.

So digital identity systems that render people too visible, that put them at the risk of surveillance and other discriminatory practices. And with both of these failures for inclusion, certain groups are more at risk than others. And we heard this in the two presentations that went before us. Think people with disabilities, chronic diseases, people with a migration status, and the list goes on. And we also heard this in the fantastic keynote on Tuesday evening by Elizabeth. But both of these failures are real dangers, are real risks in the identity systems we develop.

And importantly, these failures operate on two levels. So the one is technical. Inclusion failures build into the technological design. But the second level is more social in nature. It's more perceptual, if you want to say so. Even if you build a perfectly inclusive system, a privacy-preserving system, if people do not believe it to be so, it's still failing. So the sweet spot that we're aiming for sits in between these two ends. We call it a system and approach that fosters meaningful participation.

And at the same time, it must be an approach that is considered trustworthy and transparent by the people who are envisioned to use it. So what does all of that mean in the context of the German National UDI Wallet? So since we started this open architecture and consultation process, we have engaged with end users and different groups, societal groups, along mainly two engagement streams. So one engagement stream is direct user engagement, and the other one are more broader, large-scale information and consultation events. So on the one hand, we did user testings.

The user testings have been led by our wallet development team and complemented that very hands-on user testing with more exploratory, qualitative research, doing interviews with end users. And since 2024, we've also conducted 27 qualitative interviews with civil society organizations in Germany. And on the other hand, we have done these like broader events, consultation offerings that have enabled a broad range of stakeholders to engage with our project over the last month and years.

So I want to highlight some of the findings, and I'm actually very thankful to the two presentations that we already heard, because there's a big overlap, especially between the presentation before ours that Kay just did. And what I want to highlight here, so these are things that came out of our research. So these are things that we have seen and heard from people that we directly engaged with. When we look at Germany, one of the risks for under-identification for sure is going to be really advanced technological requirements.

So whenever we build an application that requires users to have the newest smartphone model or certain operating systems, we're building an exclusionary barrier. On top of that is the topic of cost of use. And I just want to tell you one fragment from one of the interviews that I did that was with a civil society organization representing the interests of people without housing. And in that conversation, really one of the first questions that I got was, is it going to be free of cost to use? And I was actually really happy to say, yes, it's going to be free.

It's going to be provided by the German state. Then the second question was, but what about the cost of credentials? Like how expensive is it going to be to get my national identity card into the wallet? What about my birth certificate? And I mean, the honest answer is this is going to be something that is decided along the different processes. And it's also a question that issuers need to resolve. But this discussion actually showed me a big blind spot that I had myself.

Like personally, if I apply for any document, if it costs 10 euros, 20 euros to get it issued, like it's not a big bothersome deal to me. So very obviously what I realized in that conversation is that I have a blind spot myself when it comes to talking to these different groups and the different interests they represent. And when we talk about over-identification, one thing that I want to highlight, one of the biggest concerns here is mandatory usage. People really feel strongly about that the wallet solution should be voluntary to use.

And we can only underline that voluntary usage is going to foster social trust into solutions provided to people. And with that, Chris, I hand over to you.

Great, thank you, Thea. So some of the work that we've also been conducting since we started the project, Thea mentioned that we've also been conducting qualitative user research. And out of that, we created a set of personas based on 18 qualitative research interviews that we conducted last year, where we start to cluster and group the behaviors, attitudes, and the digital literacy of these people into, I guess, this persona segmentation. And that became the foundation of how we create these personas.

This was then further supplemented through quantitative representative studies, so we could get an understanding of the demographic patterns that exist within these different persona groups in Germany. Now, this is already complex, but then you add on the complexity of what Thea just mentioned. So disabilities, accessibility, as well as these situational disadvantages that we also heard about socioeconomic disadvantages. Overlay these on top of what we see here in a persona segmentation, and you really see a set of barriers that can actually hit anyone along the segmentation.

So it is not mutually exclusive. And if you think the people in the top right-hand corner, so that would mean the people are very highly digitally literate and very resilient and optimistic to digitalization on the right-hand side. If you think that this would exclude them from such barriers, then let me maybe explain to you a little bit of my own personal lived experiences. So I am an Australian who's migrated to Germany. I would say I'm very well integrated in Germany. I've lived here for many years. I speak German on a relatively professional level.

I work here on the German-European digital identity wallet. I studied here. I live in Berlin. And I even got myself a nice little permanent residency card, or permanent residency permit, let's just say that first. So the Niederlassungserlaubnis in German. And you're probably thinking, yeah, this all looks good on paper, right? Like I should not be excluded from anything. This sounds, I should be easily fitting into all of this. I should easily have, I would be, by definition, I identify with the top right-hand corner, carefree Corrie.

So relatively digitally literate and quite optimistic about the future of digitalization. And you're probably thinking, yeah, this is all fine. But how my permanent residency looks is actually merely, you'd think it's probably a card with the EID functionality in there. Unfortunately, it is not. It is merely a piece of paper stuck onto my passport. That is my documentation that shows that I am allowed to work and live in Germany permanently.

And what this means in the context of the UD wallet is that when it does go live, sure, I can, me as well as anyone in the room, anyone here can have access to using the UD wallet to store and present their digital credentials. However, what I'm excluded from is using the identification function, which is the core functionality of the UD wallet. Something that we're always talking about, the PID, the personal identification data. So maybe you're asking how, maybe I'm up there, I should, I'm quite smart, right? I could maybe come up with a solution to work around this.

Well, a month ago, I became a naturalized German citizen. Now I have a German ID card, and now I would theoretically have access to the UD wallet when it does come live. So shouldn't we all be doing that, right?

Obviously, that is a very privileged joke. Yes, I did become German.

But no, we should not expect everyone to have the opportunity to do that. I already come from a very well-developed country with very good relations with Germany. I am in a very unique position that can do that. And not everyone even wants to do that. And this situation of the sticker on the passport is actually quite common in Berlin, actually beyond Berlin, also in Germany. So the reason why at least they've done it within Berlin is mainly for cost-saving purposes and saving work for their workers.

So apparently it costs about 39 or 49 cents per sticker, as opposed to 40 euros for a card issuance, as well as two appointments because you have to go there and pick it up, as opposed to just one appointment when you just get the sticker on the occasion that you get your permanent residency. So something that we really want to highlight here is that situational disadvantages can actually exist already in our ecosystem. And it's something that we really need to tackle. And it's something that we've highlighted very much within the project, within our team.

And it's a reason why we're already looking into future alternatives to this PID issuance. What can also be done to minimize this exclusionary aspect within the UD wallet, beyond the first stage when it goes live. Something else we also really want to highlight about when we came up with these personas. So I just mentioned earlier before about early adopters. The personas really help us to identify maybe a percentage of the group in the population in Germany to understand who are the early adopters of the UD wallet. So who can we potentially target?

So we have the pragmatic Pete's, the carefree Corey's and the open Olivia's who sit in the upper right hand corner, who are relatively digitally literate and relatively optimistic about digitalization in Germany. But something we also really want to highlight is the top left hand side, which was actually the digitally literate, but quite skeptical. So the critical Chris's. These are the people who actually understand these technologies, but are really uncertain about, well, where is this actually going in the future? What happens if the technology is misused and goes against us?

Because they actually understand a lot more behind it and their concerns are very justified. So these are the critics that civil society quite often reference. These are the watchdogs that point out anything when they realize that what we're doing may go down the wrong path. They will hold us accountable. And it's just really important for us to really emphasize that we really need to listen to these people. Basically piggybacking off again on Elizabeth's talk on Tuesday evening, the finishing keynote, listen to your critics.

And I would even say we want to launch further into this and say, if you have the opportunity, don't just listen to your critics, work with your critics and come up with solutions together because they understand where the problems are. They don't want to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. They actually understand the problem very well. So we've already said we've said quite a lot of anecdotal information that we learned from the field. Right now we're still in the very interim phase of the UD Wallet.

As Ti already pointed out, in about six months it does go live for the first time. So these are just some takeaways that we want to give to you before we leave. So something easily digestible bits of information that you can walk away with, learnings and recommendations for designing for inclusion in the identity space. The first one we have to say is we don't always get it right. And we won't always get it right, but we must always strive to improve through continuous learning and iteration.

What we really noticed is we have this feeling that a lot of people are very hesitant to take on the responsibility of tackling the topics of accessibility and inclusion, especially in a project as wide scale and as so really in the public spotlight as the UD Wallet. And a part of this has a lot to do with the fact that people are afraid to get things wrong and make mistakes, which is totally understandable. And we're also here to say that is exactly what will happen. Because it happens to us, even with the small things.

For example, we conducted a presentation to a group of people where there were blind people in the audience and our presentation was not screen reader friendly. We have to learn from that. We get criticism from that, but we have to learn from that. And we also want to be transparent about it as well. So it's also getting the basics right before the big things. So these small things are not something we can just look over. So we can get these things right before we can also do the big things. Another aspect is the fact that we just don't know what we don't know.

Through all our engagements with civil society and different accessibility professional groups, we really understood that through these contacts, through these engagements, we really learned a lot just through talking with them. And there's so many professionals in the field around accessibility and inclusive product design that have been existing for decades. And there's just so much more you can learn from them.

And equally as important is to get engaged with people with lived experiences, people who have situational disadvantages, people who have disabilities, because they have lived realities that we cannot fathom or begin to experience. Even though we may be as empathetic as possible, but there are some things we just are not ready for. They will always surprise us and therefore get in touch with them and talk to them. So therefore we build on what you learn from listening.

So listen to the professionals, listen to the experts, listen to the people with these lived experiences, listen to the critics, and where possible, avoid making assumptions. Because? Because barriers emerge when we assume that people do things just like we do them. And what is important to realize as a community of identity practitioners, the barriers that we build into systems reflect our assumptions, reflect our biases. And challenging these biases, that is really, it cannot be an afterthought. It is the work we need to do.

So thank you so much for taking the time to listen to our presentation today. And yeah, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Thea. Thank you, Chris. Do we have questions from the audience? Yeah.

No, one in five have used them at least once and the other four have not used it. Yeah, I know.

Yeah, we have a challenging, very challenging landscape. Yeah, I think, like, to put it in broad terms, the Germans might also be a bit hesitant when it comes to digital ID. So yeah. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you to all of our speakers.