Trust Nokia, Microsoft, Philips & Gemalto to make digital life trustworthy

Stuart Corner
Monday, 11 May 2009 18:06

IT Industry - Strategy

Gemalto, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips have teamed up to "address the fundamental societal issue of trust in new and emerging digital services."

Their initiative, 'Trust in Digital Life' - announced at a Future of the Internet conference in Prague - aims to "create an agenda for innovation and promote alignment of public and private policies, to help consumers overcome the fear of identity fraud and data breaches that have dampened trust in digital services.

It will be limited life time project that, according to its web site, www.trustindigitallife.eu "aims over the course of two years to set out a vision for trustworthy products relating to information and communications technology (ICT), including devices, applications, services, and infrastructures...The [partnership] will translate this vision into an agenda for research and innovation, placing particular emphasis on transparency and accountability."

In the process, the partnership will coordinate with other initiatives as it takes an inventory of emergent digital technologies that can be combined to implement the vision, and it will engage in a broad dialogue. The organisation says that, "By presenting scenarios, or use cases, [partnership] members will illustrate how combinations of trustworthy ICT-related products can give effect to specific public policy goals."

The partners promise that Trust in Digital Life will "take a multi-disciplinary approach - involving users, markets, legal and societal aspects, and technology - that will accelerate research and development of trustworthy technologies and products."

They concede, however, that the task will be far from straightforward and are inviting any interested organisations to join the project. "There is no one simple recipe to implement trustworthiness in digital services," said Jacques Seneca, executive vice-president of Gemalto.

"We anticipate that technologists in many areas have a part to play in establishing secure credentials, identity management, secure data storage, data life cycle management, user interfaces, connected appliances, client software and Web services."