Speaking of, whatever happened to that federated(?) ID thing where you are given the choice of several companies like Experian to validate your identity? I signed up years ago to do one thing and never used it since.
Always seemed a bit odd to me, because I would have thought that even if the government didn't trust its own departments to validate government-issued documents securely (fair enough, actually, they'd probably leave it on a train), all they had to do is provide their own separate, secure, service. They say the government won't know who you're validating with, but why is that an issue anyway. At some point you have to trust the government if you're verifying your identity with their own documents in order to access government services.
Though I guess it's probably just because when they eventually do get hacked they can just blame the provider and ditch them publicly rather than have another IT disaster in the papers with their name on it.
I believe you are referring to the gov.uk Verify service [1]. It's still in existence, but on it's way out due to poor uptake.
It was pushed agressively at one point by GDS, but despite what it claims about being easy to use, it provided a poor user experience, with very high failure rates for certain demographics.
Universal login, which was the vision for this product for UK government services, is a seemingly appealing proposition but if a high percentage of people can't use it, it's pretty much doomed.
The various UK government departments adopted it sparingly or developed alternatives, which further undermined it.
Comments
Speaking of, whatever happened to that federated(?) ID thing where you are given the choice of several companies like Experian to validate your identity? I signed up years ago to do one thing and never used it since.
Always seemed a bit odd to me, because I would have thought that even if the government didn't trust its own departments to validate government-issued documents securely (fair enough, actually, they'd probably leave it on a train), all they had to do is provide their own separate, secure, service. They say the government won't know who you're validating with, but why is that an issue anyway. At some point you have to trust the government if you're verifying your identity with their own documents in order to access government services.
Though I guess it's probably just because when they eventually do get hacked they can just blame the provider and ditch them publicly rather than have another IT disaster in the papers with their name on it.
I believe you are referring to the gov.uk Verify service [1]. It's still in existence, but on it's way out due to poor uptake.
It was pushed agressively at one point by GDS, but despite what it claims about being easy to use, it provided a poor user experience, with very high failure rates for certain demographics.
Universal login, which was the vision for this product for UK government services, is a seemingly appealing proposition but if a high percentage of people can't use it, it's pretty much doomed.
The various UK government departments adopted it sparingly or developed alternatives, which further undermined it.
1 - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk...
I've used the UK verify service, and it was pretty horrible then. Only country I've seen do it somewhat well is Singapore, with Singpass.