Question 1

What is a digital identity wallet?

Accepted Answer

An application holding **verifiable credentials** — cryptographically signed statements about you issued by a trusted body — that you present selectively, without the verifier needing to contact the issuer.

**The three parties:** an **issuer** — a government, university, employer or bank — who signs a credential; a **holder**, you, storing it in your wallet; and a **verifier**, who checks the signature. Crucially, **the verifier does not have to phone the issuer**, because the signature itself proves authenticity and that nothing has been altered.

**Why this is an improvement on what exists.** Today, proving something about yourself usually means handing over a document containing far more than required. Showing a driving licence to prove you are over 18 reveals your exact date of birth, full name, address and licence number — **all of it, to prove one fact.**

**Selective disclosure** is the key capability: presenting only the specific attribute, and in some schemes only the **answer to a predicate** — "is over 18: true" — without revealing the underlying date at all, using zero-knowledge techniques.

**Where it is heading:** national identity and residence credentials; driving licences in digital form; educational and professional qualifications, which are currently expensive and slow to verify; employment and right-to-work checks; and age verification, which is under regulatory pressure and where the privacy-preserving version matters a great deal.

**The genuine concerns:**

**Phone dependence and exclusion.** People without a smartphone, or who lose access, must not be locked out of essential services — which requires non-digital routes to remain.

**Over-collection by verifiers**, who may demand the full credential when they only need one attribute, defeating the purpose. **Whether selective disclosure is used in practice is a governance question, not a technical one.**

**Correlation**, where the same credential presented repeatedly allows tracking across services, unless unlinkable presentation is designed in.

**Compulsion**, where a voluntary scheme becomes effectively mandatory through adoption.

**Recovery**, since losing a device must not mean losing your identity.

**Standards** are converging, which is what determines whether wallets interoperate across borders.

Question 2

Are electronic signatures legally valid?

Accepted Answer

In most jurisdictions yes, for the great majority of documents — the law generally does not require a handwritten signature, and the practical question is evidential: can you prove who signed, that

Question 3

What is the difference between anonymisation and pseudonymisation?

Accepted Answer

Whether the data can still be linked back to a person. Anonymised data cannot, and falls outside data protection law entirely. Pseudonymised data can, with additional information, and remains fully

Question 4

What happens to your digital accounts when you die?

Accepted Answer

Far less automatically than people assume. Most accounts are licences to use a service, not property, and access is governed by the provider's terms rather than by your will — which is why planning

Question 5

What is content provenance, and what is C2PA?

Accepted Answer

A way of recording where a piece of media came from and what was done to it, cryptographically attached to the file — an approach to the synthetic media problem that works in the opposite direction

Question 6

What is a subject access request, and what must an organisation provide?

Accepted Answer

A right of access under data protection law allowing anyone to ask an organisation what personal data it holds about them, and to receive a copy — and the scope is wider than most organisations

Question 7

What are the risks of scanning a QR code?

Accepted Answer

A QR code is simply an encoded string — most often a URL — and the risk is that you cannot read it before you act on it. That single property is what makes the format attractive to fraudsters. The

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