The EUDI Wallet, currently in its testing phase, is designed to give EU citizens a single, secure platform to store and share digital credentials – from driver's licenses to medical records. This wallet will store digital versions of national ID cards, driving licenses, academic credentials and medical records, allowing users to authenticate themselves online and offline. The system, currently voluntary, is marketed as a way to reduce bureaucracy and enhance cross-border digital services.
However, Henk Marsman, a researcher at Delft University of Technology and consultant at SonicBee, argued that without stringent safeguards, the initiative risks enabling excessive data harvesting by businesses and governments, undermining the very privacy it claims to protect. Henk warned that user control alone does not ensure privacy, as people can be easily manipulated by design tricks, dark patterns, or financial incentives—even when they believe they are making informed decisions.
"Even though I think I'm an autonomous being and I make informed decisions, I can be quite easily manipulated and influenced by nudging techniques, by dark patterns, or just by a five percent discount," Marsman said during the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) in Berlin.
The issue, Marsman explained, lies in the incentives of "relying parties" – businesses and services that request identity verification. Many operate on data-driven models, creating a built-in motivation to demand more data than strictly needed.
"If the relying party wouldn't ask too much, we wouldn't have this risk. One of the challenges with relying parties is that they have a data-driven business model or at least some of them have, and that is the incentive to get more data off their users," Marsman continued...<<<Read More>>>...
