Reliable certainties in the Digital World
FIDES: An Ecosystem for Digital Trust is essential
FIDES is an international movement committed to enhancing the reliability of the internet. Together with over a hundred partners, we are working to develop an innovative ecosystem that fosters a more effective and equitable digital world. The core of this ecosystem lies in collaboratively developing digital solutions and ecosystems to enhance digital trust, with continuous improvement as the driving force and users as the focal point. The need for such a new ecosystem is significant. As more processes become digitalized, users find it increasingly difficult to verify the trustworthiness of information and its sources.
Seizing Opportunities
The internet, artificial intelligence, and other forms of digitalization are rapidly transforming the world, offering substantial economic opportunities and solutions to major challenges. However, they also introduce new challenges, such as fake news, cybercrime, and digital inequality. Unlike the physical world, the digital realm lacks extensive regulations, partly due to the rapid pace of development and the global nature of the internet, which transcends traditional legislative boundaries. As a result, organizations, countries, and individuals often operate based on their own standards.
The Potential of Digitalization
Trust is a cornerstone of any society, including the digital one. The full potential of digitalization depends on the trust people place in both the technology and the entities offering services through that technology. Users miss out on opportunities in digital technology as long as they cannot be certain of who or "what" they are interacting with. Without significant improvements in digital trust, many technological opportunities will remain untapped. Achieving digital trust requires collective action and consensus among a diverse group of public and private organizations and individuals.
Working Together for Digital Trust
Trust is crucial, but continuously adapting to new challenges and technologies to build trust is costly and complex for public and private organizations and individuals. FIDES offers a collaborative research and development approach to create and test a variety of solutions for current and future challenges. This freedom of choice in solutions is important and contributes to digital trust.
This requires broad adoption of open standards and interoperability profiles, ensuring that different systems, applications, or components work seamlessly together.
FIDES is committed to developing these interoperable digital solutions that contribute to trust. Our approach provides organizations with common interests the opportunity to collaborate on generic and cross-domain Lab initiatives, all within a neutral, vendor-independent, and interoperable environment.
Democratic Values
Over the next two years, FIDES will focus on the international adoption of trusted digital identities for people, organizations, and "things." This approach aligns with new legislation such as eIDAS 2 (EU Digital Wallet), Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). It also addresses global challenges such as fake news and opaque supply chains, where verifying origin and sustainability claims is difficult. Users retain control over their own data, and privacy is guaranteed. This approach helps individuals and organizations collaborate based on trust, across national borders. Important European democratic values such as privacy, freedom, and inclusivity are safeguarded.
Benefits of the Ecosystem
The new ecosystem that FIDES advocates for:
Aligns with the desire of governments and businesses to further improve the reliable exchange of information. For example, through the revision of the European eIDAS regulation, which encourages the development of digital identities.
Facilitates data accessibility within Europe, enabling better sustainable choices for individuals and businesses. Examples include the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR).
Ensures a fairer and safer internet, more in service of society. Currently, large technology companies hold a dominant position, collecting vast amounts of user data. Users have no insight into its use and cannot manage or control the information. This contributes to the spread of disinformation, data breaches, data hoarding, and identity fraud.
Strengthens the economy by increasing trust. Individuals and businesses are more likely to engage in transactions when they have confidence in providers and services.
Creates positive societal impact. A trust-based ecosystem returns control over personal data to users. This balances the power dynamics between governments and companies on one side, and individuals on the other. This approach aligns with the European Union's efforts to reduce the power of organizations on the internet through legislation.
FIDES Accelerates Innovation
The ecosystem that FIDES helps develop strengthens digital trust and thereby accelerates digital innovation. We envision a future where there is freedom of choice in usable solutions, utilizing open standards and based on transparency and verifiability.
We do this by encouraging collaboration and innovation, including through organizing FIDES Labs and FIDES Plugfests together with supporters and sponsors.
Organizations with common interests can work together on generic or cross-domain Labs initiatives, all within a neutral, vendor-independent, and interoperable environment.
FIDES Plugfests bring together solution providers to demonstrate working solutions based on predefined themes and use cases. These provide concrete examples of how organizations and individuals can benefit from digital trust solutions. The results are presented during a physical (international) event, attended by policymakers, the press, sponsors, and interest groups. FIDES Plugfests are not sales shows but transparent demonstrations of the current state of technology.
By fostering interaction, collaboration, and knowledge exchange, we know how to accelerate innovation in a rapidly evolving field that demands constant experimentation, development, testing, and implementation of technologies. Many applications within this ecosystem are still new and untested. With more assurances, digital technology becomes accessible to more organizations and individuals.
