The idea of a digital identity and wallet for citizens residing within the European Union may date back to 2020, but pandemic-era restrictions have shown the extent to which governments can shut off access to everyday life, should they so choose – and with ever-changing criteria that can be difficult to appeal when something goes wrong. That’s a frightening prospect when considering how much of one’s life the supranational European government wants to connect to a new system that it’s set to roll out.
As the Covid-19 pandemic shot around the world, the first public utterances of a Europe-wide digital identity system started emerging from EU think tanks and officials. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech in September 2020 that “the Commission will soon propose a secure European e-identity. One that we trust and that any citizen can use anywhere in Europe to do anything from paying your taxes to renting a bicycle. A technology where we can control ourselves what data and how data is used.”
At the time, anyone suggesting that one day EU member countries would implement systems of QR codes for access to everyday venues, contingent on a government-dictated number of injections and linked to a larger EU passport system – on which travel around the bloc would be dependent – would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
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