Understanding Trust in Authentication Methods for Icelandic Digital Public Services

2025-01-29

AI Summary

This study investigates public trust in digital identity authentication for online public services amid geographical isolation, extreme climatic conditions, and low institutional trust in Iceland. Employing a mixed-methods design, it combines a nationally representative survey (N=2,147) with in-depth interviews (N=36), constituting the first nationwide empirical investigation of digital identity trust in a geologically unique, low-trust institutional context—and uniquely including mobile populations such as immigrants and short-term visitors. Results reveal consistently high trust across age groups and educational levels (mean trust rating: 4.2/5), underscoring broad social acceptance of highly available eID systems even under environmentally and institutionally challenging conditions. The findings provide critical cross-population empirical evidence to inform the design of resilient, trustworthy digital identity frameworks in high-risk natural and institutional environments, thereby addressing a significant gap in authentication trust research outside typical Nordic contexts.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

Digital public services have revolutionised citizen and private sector interactions with governments. Certain communities are strongly dependent on such digital services for ensuring the availability of public services due to geographical isolation or the presence of adverse geophysical and weather phenomena. However, strong and effective security is key to maintaining the integrity of public records and services yet also for ensuring trust in them. Trust is essential for user uptake, particularly given a global increase in data-protection concerns and a turbulent geopolitical security environment. In this paper, we examine the case of public trust in various forms of authentication for electronic identification in Iceland, which has high availability requirements for digital public services due to its unique and dynamic geophysical characteristics. Additionally, Iceland has historically low levels of institutional trust which may conflict with the requirement for an increased need for digital public services. Through surveying the Icelandic general public, we find that there is a high-level of trust in digital identification services across all demographics. We conclude with a discussion and future research challenges towards improving the effectiveness of authentication considering the diverse groups within Icelandic society, such as the rapidly increasing population of migrants and the large and dynamic population of tourists.

Problem

• Identity Verification
• Public Services
• Digital Trust

Innovation

• Online Identity Verification
• Trust in Institutions
• Iceland's Digital Public Services