Digital Identity & Trust
Proving online who you are and what is genuine, despite fraud, deepfakes and the need for privacy.
Open in the interactive tree →The internet was built without an identity layer; passwords, certificates and ID copies serve as a makeshift replacement. With AI, voices, images and videos can be faked convincingly, and fraud scales. What is needed are verifiable proofs (“I am over 18”, “this picture comes from this camera”) without surveillance.
As of October 2026
The EU obliges member states to offer at least one EU digital identity wallet by the end of 2026 (24 December 2026); readiness reports from spring 2026 say fewer than a third of states meet the benchmarks. Service providers that are legally required to identify their customers must accept the wallet. The Stanford AI Index counted 362 documented AI incidents in 2025 (233 in 2024).
What is missing
- Common standards so wallets work across borders
- Recovery after device loss without a security hole
- Privacy-preserving proofs (selective disclosure, zero-knowledge) in mass operation
- Adoption and acceptance by citizens and companies
- Reliable provenance for media and proof that a human is acting in the AI age
Becomes possible once solved
- Government services, bank accounts and contracts fully online
- Age proof and entitlements without a data trail
- Effective protection against identity fraud and deepfake scams
Open steps
- Privacy-preserving proofs at scale Low AI leverageRun zero-knowledge and selective-disclosure credentials on phones at national scale with fast proofs and audited code.
- Provenance for media Low AI leverageProve which images, audio and video are authentic or AI-made through signatures and hardware attestation, not by guessing from pixels.
- Proof of a human or authorized agent Low AI leverageShow that an account or transaction comes from a real person or an authorized AI agent without revealing identity.
- Safe recovery after device loss Low AI leverageRestore a wallet's credentials on a new phone without a back door that attackers can use.
Where AI could help
Low AI leverage. The blockers are standards, adoption, law and device-recovery design; AI mostly adds fakes, and detectors lag behind new generators.
- Flag synthetic-media fraud and account-takeover patterns in real time
- Test wallet implementations and protocols for conformance and security bugs automatically
- Improve liveness checks and document verification, with attention to bias
Prerequisites
- The Internet1969
- E-mail1971The e-mail address became the default online identity and recovery channel
- Public-Key Cryptography1976
- Encrypted Web (Let's Encrypt)2015Digital identity schemes rely on the same certificate infrastructure that secures the web
- Large Language Models2022