Collaborative Trusted Digital Services for Citizens

In modern society, citizens aspire to get trusted and reliable digital services to authenticate theirs to payments. With the COVID-19 crisis, online shopping’s fast growth has led citizens to increase registration in different systems. The registration is typically done without any guarantee that the involved business entity is trusted and that private data is managed adequately, namely according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There are cases where online business adopts a federated authentication mechanism based on the existing and extensively adopted service providers, e.g., Facebook, and Google. With the European authorities’ complacency, this de facto trend seems to contribute to a dangerous unregulated digital services model. While avoiding the centralization risks, a possible alternative is to pursue the concept of regulated and competing digital online shops or services offered under a single collaborative model across Europe. Citizens aspire to get simple mechanisms based on a single provider for authentication and pay anywhere, even with some associated costs. In this direction, we propose a model that considers regulated providers managing citizens’ access to any online business in Europe, avoiding, in this way, the spreading of personal data across (business) organizations, thus decreasing the risk of personal data leaks. A collaborative network is foreseen to logically tie committed regulating authorities, providers, and digital online service providers. The proposed approach is ground on our previous research on systems integration, collaborative network infrastructure, and unified mobility payment services. This position paper offers a digital strategy for citizens, designated by Digital Person Ecosystem (DPE), which relies on Collaborative Networks concepts and centered on public authority leadership.