Canadians increasingly ready to adopt digital credentials

An estimated 1 percent of Canada’s GDP ($15 billion CAD/$11.3 billion USD to be exact) worth digital identity industry is on the cusp of an economic uptick, according to a white paper produced by the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC).

According to the paper, Trust & the Evolution of Digital Identity in Canada, 80% of Canadians are in support of digital IDs. The paper also revealed that three quarters of the population surveyed hold the belief that government should expedite the implementation of digital IDs. As such, the DIACC advised that the time is ripe to decentralise the industry to allow private and public entities to adopt and commission digital credentials. The organisation itself has restructured its board to deal with the expected developments in the areas of digital trust and identity, and data control and privacy. It pinpoints that a decentralised system will reduce the occurrence of fraud cases by distributing information across myriad storage points. This then renders it difficult for cybercriminals to compromise sensitive data. 

The paper also reported that Canada has been flagged by a World Economic Forum for allowing third party entities to gain access to customer data housed in some 72% of Canadian companies, an occurrence it places square at the feet of the country’s privacy policy.