The Enterprise Privacy Group is a centre of expertise in privacy, data protection and identity-related issues. We work with central and local government, leading private companies and research organisations to resolve privacy and identity issues, and to develop innovative and efficient privacy management solutions.

Latest Updates from EPG
Cookie Policy Changes
Thursday, 07 July 2011
In recognition of the new EU Directive on cookie handling, the EPG website has been modified to remove cookies. This should not impair site access, other than forcing us to remove the ability to set user-defined font sizes. We have also removed our Google Analytics usage as part of this new policy.

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Work in Progress!
Saturday, 30 April 2011
We're currently giving the EPG website a major overhaul, so please be patient if the content seems a little erratic over the next few days - normal service will be resumed very shortly!

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The State of the Electronic Identity Market
Thursday, 30 December 2010

The European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) has published a report on 'The State of the Electronic Identity Market: Technologies, Infrastructure, Services and Policies.' Co-authored by EPG's Toby Stevens, together with teams from IPTS and Consult Hyperion , the report explores the challenges arising from use of individuals' credentials for access to online services.

The document concludes that the market for electronic ID is immature. It claims that the potentially great added value of eID technologies in enabling the Digital Economy has not yet been fulfilled, and fresh efforts are needed to build identification and authentication systems that people can live with, trust and use. The study finds that usability, minimum disclosure and portability, essential features of future systems, are at the margin of the market and cross-country, cross-sector eID systems for business and public service are only in their infancy.

This was a particularly tough document to write, since the scope of ID is potentially so large, yet there are so many confused and conflicting concepts, terminologies and delivery approaches. Qualitative data about the value of ID services is almost non-existent, and tends to focus principally upon enterprise identity management technologies. At the time we wrote the document, the UK was gripped by the inertia and non-delivery of the failing National Identity Service, and the impact of that is reflected in the document.

The report is available for free and can be downloaded here.