ID2020 Summit addresses the need to create a legal digital identity for all

The UN Headquarters in New York hosted the ID2020 Summit last Sunday, responding to the 2015 pledge of world leaders ‘to provide a legal identity to all by 2030’. The summit brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including industry leaders, NGOs, government representatives and technology pioneers, and focused in particular on the opportunities of providing digital identities. Many solutions highlighted the need for decentralisation and the question of whether governments should be the holder of an identity database, or whether such data should be in a global, public database of some kind.