On Wednesday 8 November, negotiators from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament reached a final agreement on the European Digital Identity Wallet (DIW). A provisional political agreement had already been reached on 29 June, after more than nine hours of inter-institutional negotiations on the key elements of the dossier (see EUROPE 13212/6).
The text provides that every citizen of the EU Member States will be able to use, on a voluntary basis, a Digital Identity Wallet to access online services, whether public or private.
The very large online platforms and search engines designated under the Digital Services Act (DSA) (see EUROPE 13286/8) will be required to authenticate their users. These companies will have to accept the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet to connect to their online services.
In practice, the future European Digital Identity Wallet will have to enable users to open bank accounts, make payments or store their digital documents - including official documents - centrally and identify themselves online. It is up to the user to decide whether or not to share their personal data.
“This will allow people to settle their affairs more quickly, without having to be physically present to sign or send physical documents”, commented Riho Terras (EPP, Estonian).
The Digital Identity Wallet will contain a dashboard of all the transactions accessible to its holder and will provide the option of reporting suspected data protection breaches. In addition, interaction between wallets will be possible and citizens should be able to integrate their wallets into existing national electronic identification systems in order to benefit from free electronic signatures for personal use.
The final agreement still has to be put to the vote at the European Parliament plenary session and ratified by the Member States. They will then have 24 months after the adoption of the implementing acts defining the technical specifications of the Digital Identity Wallet to make it available to citizens. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)