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Integrators Will Help Governments Deliver on the Promise of Mobile Identity

Government agencies can realize several benefits from implementing a mobile ID. These are widely varied, depending upon the use case, but at a minimum, the government agency issuing credentials would greatly reduce its costs in implementing and maintaining complex infrastructures to assign, revoke or change someone’s credential. Further, governments could greatly reduce their risk and the expenses incurred from the use of fraudulent credentials for accessing government-funded, nationalized programs. Government might even be able to produce new revenue streams by encouraging third-party entities like banks and other commercial enterprises to use mobile IDs. In all cases, system integrators are integral to helping government agencies realize these benefits but only if they can deliver technically robust, cost-efficient, trusted identity solutions that minimize fraud and privacy risks while creating new revenue opportunities.

HID Global’s goID™ mobile ID platform is one such proven identity solution. This is because it is powered by Seos®, HID Global’s credential technology. Seos provides four layers of security and has been used in such high-profile mobile credential deployments as the Starwood Preferred Guest® program, which enables members to use their smartphones as room keys. HID Global also has a track record of success in issuing and managing mobile identities in both the government and commercial sectors, providing government integrators the confidence that they can securely implement semi-decentralized ID and electronic ID card issuance at distribution centers all over the country, issuing credentials over-the-air directly to the mobile phone of the right citizen.

However, before selecting a mobile ID solution, integrators also need assurances that the system they choose can manage and mitigate the risk of fraud, data breaches and threats to citizens’ privacy. This is why HID Global’s goID platform does not retain any personal information, preventing fraudsters from discovering and using someone’s identity through a back-end system, let alone compromising or even deleting someone’s data. The goID platform uses strong, standards-based cryptography, enabling a citizen’s data to be viewed by the intended authenticating smartphone – no one else can access that citizen’s personal information, nor track their identity. Additionally, verification of their mobile data can be accomplished without requiring the citizen to hand over their smartphone.

Mobile ID solutions shouldn’t require that the integrator’s government customers make a heavy upfront investment in hardware, either. Instead, solutions should minimize deployment costs by enabling customers to use their existing databases and signing service but with the convenience of cloud hosting. The goID platform also enables a government customer’s IT manager to mutualize its physical and mobile identity management operations, optimizing the cost associated with issuing, maintaining and/or revoking citizen credentials without compromising security.

If you’re still trying to envision a world where mobile IDs could be effective for citizen programs, I encourage you to watch our new video. It’s only a matter of time when local system integrators will be able to offer these services to governments and their citizens alike.

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