Legislation for a digital identity verification system in the US has progressed to the Senate for debate. That means that the US could soon have a digital ID, which is opposed by most digital rights groups over privacy concerns.
The Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023 was introduced by Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
It was introduced in the Senate for debate last month after being approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“The lack of an easy, affordable, reliable, and secure way for organizations, businesses, and government agencies to identify whether an individual is who they claim to be online, creates an attack vector that is widely exploited by adversaries in cyberspace and precludes many high-value transactions from being available online,” the text of the bill states.
“Incidents of identity theft and identity fraud continue to rise in the United States, where more than 293,000,000 people were impacted by data breaches in 2021.
“Since 2017, losses resulting from identity fraud have increased by 333 percent, and, in 2020, those losses totaled $56,000,000,000.”
The bill would require the creation of an interagency task force to oversee a public-private collaboration to “help all citizens more easily and securely engage in transactions online” and “prove who they are online.”
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