A Landscape Survey of Private Digital Credentials
In June 2025 we published a survey on Tech Policy Press of seven national digital ID systems—examining India, Estonia, Singapore, Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, and Pakistan—to better understand the dynamics of nation state-issued digital ID systems as generative AI began to turn impersonation, document forgery, and synthetic persona creation into readily available, scalable capabilities. We examined these existing endeavors to understand what drives adoption, what facilitates trust, and how privacy and security trade off in practice as citizens decide (or in some cases, are compelled) to participate.
We learned that adoption is often driven by a sense of necessity, as digital IDs become necessary for essential services, and that promises of “decentralized” ID by some governments are often overstated rather than actual technological reality. We also found that the story isn’t purely technical: legitimacy and accountability—who controls data, who can access it, and what recourse exists when systems fail—shape whether people perceive IDs as infrastructure or coercion. We covered significant failures, from privacy violations to aging causing issues with biometric verification. Estonia was one of the few countries we looked at that built meaningful auditability into the system: citizens can view data-access logs via a “data tracker” tool that shows who accessed their personal data, when, and for what purpose.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance