Collection:Electronic identification
An electronic identification ("eID") is a digital solution for proof of identity of citizens or organizations, for example in view to access benefits or services provided by government authorities, banks or other companies, for mobile payments, etc. Apart from online authentication and login, many electronic identity services also give users the option to sign electronic documents with a digital signature.
An eID is directly connected to the person using it. Since most eID programs are proprietary, backdoors can be installed in these programs to spy on the user. There are legitimate uses for electronic identification -- for instance, for transactions with the state or with banks. However, organizations may try to push people to identify themselves for things they should be able to do anonymously.
Therefore, don't assume that making you identify yourself is acceptable for any given activity merely because they let you do it with free software.
It is often to complex to write free eID variants of proprietery eID from scratch. Free eID often has to be developed by reversed engineered proprietary eID but that is a very hard task which is one of the primarily reasons why free eID programs have become more rare.
This page lists eID programs distributed as free software to protect the users from backdoors.
| Free eID replacement | Proprietary eID | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software | Status | Software | Mandatory log in (privacy issue) | Country or territory |
| FriBID | Obsolete | BankID | Public health care: 1177.se | Sweden |
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the page “GNU Free Documentation License”.
The copyright and license notices on this page only apply to the text on this page. Any software or copyright-licenses or other similar notices described in this text has its own copyright notice and license, which can usually be found in the distribution or license text itself.