The team of researchers will organise itself into five working groups to answer the NWO’s call for research Digital Identities: A Foundation for Trust in the Digital World. In their proposal, the researchers identify existing digital identity solutions as sprawling societal infrastructures that are flawed, fragmented and insecure – and they pose significant risks to individual privacy, digital inclusion, democratic legitimacy, institutional resilience and, ultimately, the valuable resource of public trust. Their proposal Foundations for Identity and Trust at EU-Scale explains how they plan to address this.
Who can be trusted online?
In Europe alone, a staggering number of online accounts are detected as untrustworthy and suspended or terminated every year. Content moderation decisions are tracked in the Transparency Database that comes from the European Union’s Digital Services Act, and exposes online harms that come from the lack of good digital identity solutions. The first quarter of 2025 alone saw Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) – which include Google and its various arms, YouTube, Amazon Store, Zalando, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, AliExpress and Booking.com – suspending or terminating almost 285 million accounts, with smaller digital platforms reporting around 6 million suspensions or terminations. And because not all fake accounts are captured and terminated, this is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Such numbers underscore the urgency of reliable digital identities.
The challenges addressed by the proposal are urgent, says Prof. Bongaerts. The lack of a stable, comprehensive digital identity in day‐to‐day online interactions mediated by online platforms is the root cause of a number of grave societal problems. These range from billions of dollars lost to online fraud, via fake accounts spewing mis‐ and disinformation in online platforms, to rogue state actors destabilising democratic elections.
Five work packages focused on urgent challenges
Dion Bongaerts is Professor of Financial Technology and Data Analytics at RSM, and Expert Practice Director for Fintech in the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics. With partners from Delft TU’s Computer Science Department and the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Law, the researchers aim to build the foundations of reliable digital identity systems through five work packages. Prof. Bongaerts will lead one of the work packages and is in charge of optimising economic and business value while satisfying incentive constraints for adopting and using the developed solutions in a correct way. Other work packages develop hardware methods for being able to prove a digital identity; explore and set up optimal governance schemes; understand critical factors for adoption; and develop the digital identity itself through technology and software and validate it in user tests.
Project partners with ‘skin in the game’
The importance of finding ways to establish rock-solid digital identities has elicited support beyond the generosity of NWO. A number of organisations with ‘skin in the game’ are supporting or contributing to the project, including The Dutch Tax Office (Belastingdienst), Animo Solutions BV, Dutch Identity Agency, DigiDentity, the European Commission DG-Grow, the European Commission DIGIT, FreedomLab BV, Kamer van Koophandel, Ubiqu Access BV, and TNO.
