GOV.UK is working to track the amount of the population whom are eligible to verify their identity via GOV.UK Verify.
GOV.UK Verify is a newly introduced service which helps citizens to prove who they are online with ease. This will allow them to view services such as tax filing and drivers licence details.
GOV.UK Verify will ensure that the user accessing services are who they say they are, as it has been built to meet the 9 identity assurance principles established by the UK Government.
This week, GOV.UK developed a demographic coverage web tool which explores which citizens have the ability to verify their identity through GOV.UK Verify.
GDS aims to reach 90 percent of the demographic coverage by April of this year when GOV.UK Verify goes live.
This tool is essential to tracking its current reach and gaps in the market. It also helps GOV.UK discover more about their users and the potential for certified companies to innovate off the Verify platform.
The data for this tool was sourced from over 2,000 interviews, which took place from August 2015 until October 2015.
“By interviewing people on what evidence and/or technology they have and comparing that to the verification methods used by our certified companies, we’re able to say whether or not people would be able to get verified,” stated Michael Clark and Kyran Dale on the GOV.UK blog,
“To make this analysis transparent, we're releasing a web tool to let people explore the data as well as underlying data to let people run their own analysis.”
One of the interesting things discovered by the web tool was that people in rural areas are more likely to use GOV.UK Verify. This is because they often have a driving licence, or use the kind of financial products which create a credit history that GOV.UK certified companies currently use to verify identities online.
This web tool will be utilized through the summer of 2016.
As this is the first iteration of the tool, GOV.UK will work to add more demographics, more data, and more analyses to help increase its capabilities. They have employed data visualization experts to explore opportunities for more effective analysis.
