The Policy development workstream of the Open Digital Trust Initiative has developed draft Principles for Digital Trust Networks, identifying the high level ‘rules of the road’ that digital trust networks should adopt in order to incentivize a high level of digital trust, user centricity and low cost, while ensuring that these networks are economically viable and the role of assurance provider is adequately rewarded and realistically protected from a liability perspective.
The broad vision is for Digital Trust Networks to comprise a set of participants, including both Users (who are also individual Data Subjects for individual data protection purposes in many cases), Assurance Providers and Relying Parties. There is also scope for other types of intermediaries to be defined by the Network rules.
Digital Trust Networks are anticipated to have associated Governance Arrangements, which should adhere to certain minimum principles, and may be separate legal entities. The Governance Arrangements will have responsibility for setting out Liability Rules, and other rules and requirements, to be complied with by Network Participants.
While the IIF and Open ID Foundation do not themselves propose to “police” the Principles, or award or allocate trust marks to particular Digital Trust Networks, they would encourage third-party verifiers, auditors and others to consider offering these services. The Open Digital Trust Initiative may also road-test the draft Principles in the first half of 2021, through one or more Proof of Concept projects.
Written feedback is invited on the draft Principles for Digital Trust Networks, by email to: [email protected], and comments should be submitted by April 30, 2021. If you would like a Word document version of this draft in order to propose inline edits, please contact Mina Loldj at [email protected]. Submissions may be published, unless confidentiality is expressly requested. The aim is to release a finalized version 1.0 of the Principles in 2021.
UPDATE: Final Principles Released 2/15/2022