- Federal Council opens consultation on E‑ID Act to create legal and organizational basis for state-recognized electronic means of identification.
- Private and public identification service providers can be authorized by the federal government; use of personal data only permitted with consent and for a specific purpose.
In its today’s (February 22, 2017) Media release the Federal Council informed that at today’s meeting it had opened a consultation on a federal law on recognized electronic identification units (E‑ID law). This is intended to create the legal and organizational framework for the recognition of electronic identification units and their providers.
In order to facilitate the processing of digital transactions and to enable the parties to identify the other party in online transactions, the state should provide electronic means of identification that can be used (in the analog world, this would be the Swiss passport, the ID or the foreigner’s identity card, for example). It should be possible to create such e‑IDs for Swiss citizens as well as for foreigners with a valid foreigner’s identity card.
The Federal Council assumes a division of tasks between the state and the market. Specifically, suitable private or public identification service providers should be able to obtain approval from a recognition body at federal level to issue state-recognized electronic identification means. For example, systems that already exist or are being developed, such as the projects of Swiss Post and SBB as well as banks and Swisscom, should also be able to be recognized by the federal government.
The initial transmission of personal identification data by the identification service provider to the relevant databases would require the consent of the data subjects. Furthermore, the personal data in question would only be allowed to be used by the identification service providers to provide the identification service.
The consultation will last until May 29, 2017.