Facebook and PayPal could be used by government for online identity verification

Facebook pen and paper - Image credit: Sarah Marshall via Flickr

People have become more open to allowing the government access to online accounts like Facebook and PayPal to help it verify their identity, according to research by the Open Identity Exchange (OIX).

The research, which was supported by six partners including the Government Digital Service and Veridu, assessed whether social networks and online accounts could be used as evidence when creating a digital identity such as the UK government’s GOV.UK Verify.

It found that there had been a “significant change” in users’ willingness to allow access to online accounts in order to verify their identities compared with a similar study in 2013, which identified a lack of understanding of the process and concerns about privacy.

An alpha test to see whether such a verification system would work was deemed successful and the OIX report recommended that it be developed into a commercial beta service.

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The idea behind the research is to increase the number of people who are able to register for such services – the UK government wants to see 90 per cent of people who need to use GOV.UK Verify being able to do so by the end of the year.

At the moment, the certified companies that carry out identity checks often rely on credit history to measure activity history, but this can prevent some people, particularly young people and immigrants, from using the service.

Social networks and online accounts offer a solution to this. Research commissioned by the GDS found that 52 per cent of UK adults have a social media account they use at least once a month.

It estimates that GOV.UK Verify coverage could increase by 9 per cent overall and by 38 per cent for people aged between 16 and 25 if it used social media activity.

The OIX research involved 12 face-to-face interviews with users, followed by a round of internal testing by 86 participants of a gateway that was developed by Veridu specifically for the project.

The user testing found that all participants understood the concept of identity verification – a big increase on the 2013 work, which the report said could be due an increased use of e-commerce transactions – and two-thirds said they would use the service.

Over a third – 36 per cent – in the first round of testing chose PayPal as their first option to verify their online activity, which the report suggests could be due to its association with banking and the fact it doesn’t contain social data.

Facebook elicited the most emotive response, with many saying they would not want the government or the third part company carrying out the tests having access to the information in their Facebook accounts.

Despite this, 18 per cent of testers chose Facebook as their first choice, which the report said could be because people are often continuously logged in to the site as well as the use of Facebook Connect to log in to other services.

LinkedIn was the most popular second choice – 30 per cent of all second choices – which the report said might be because it has limited personal data and is seen as storing work information.

Twitter and Dropbox were not chosen by any users.

The report added that by offering participants a range of options – rather than only Facebook – it allayed concerns about companies or the government wanting access to personal information.

In the second phase of the research, 86 volunteers – most of whom were aged between 25 and 44 – used a test system developed by Veridu to see whether such online accounts could be used to verify identities.

The pass rate for the 180-day activity threshold, which is the standard required by GOV.UK Verify, was 82 per cent, while the 360-day pass-rate was 60 per cent.

The OIX report recommends that Veridu works with certified companies to develop the test so that it satisfies government verification standards and can be scaled up.

Meanwhile, the GDS said in a blog that it was taking forward a number of projects with private sector bodies to see how they can improve GOV.UK Verify’s coverage and is interested in hearing from others who are developing similar identity services from new data sources.