Advocacy group Free Speech Ireland has expressed strong reservations after the Government announced the rollout of a “Digital Wallet” to store personal documents digitally in one place.
CEO Sarah O’Reilly told Gript that the Digital Wallet “will eliminate your ability to be online anonymously,” which she called “an attack on privacy”.
The Ministers Jack Chambers and Frank Feighan announced the launch of a public consultation and testing phase to help shape Ireland’s new Government Digital Wallet earlier this month.
A government spokesperson said the measure intends to make it so that people can have digital versions of their birth cert, driving license, European health card, and other official documents “stored safely and securely in a digital wallet on their mobile. This will make it much easier to access public services and verify identity both online and in person.”
At the launch of the initiative, Minister Chambers said the Digital Wallet is “designed so that all personal data is fully protected, and the user stays in control of what information they put in the Wallet and choose to share. Only the details needed for a service will be shared, and nothing more.”
However, FSI warned that the move poses a significant risk to privacy, emphasising that this is “a constitutionally protected right”.
“Speaking truth to power means protecting anonymity,” O’Reilly said, adding, “A free society, and a free press, are dependent on functions such as whistleblowing and anonymous sources.”
Minister Frank Feighan said the wallet “will be able to facilitate secure age verification capability as set out in Digital Ireland and the implementation of the Online Safety Code, under which designated platforms must have age verification measures in place to help protect, in particular, children and young people from online harm.”
O’Reilly argues that “Social media and online interaction are crucial for this function in our democratic society. If the state has a centralised identifier for your Facebook or X account, the state has the potential to easily track your comments, private or public.”
“We strongly advise Minister Jack Chambers to abandon these plans. The Irish public has made it clear in the past few years that it wants free speech in society and does not want government interference in this constitutionally protected right,” she concluded.
As Gript previously reported, the Department of Public Expenditure explicitly described the scheme as being designed around meeting “Ireland’s legal obligations under the EU’s eIDAS 2 Regulation”.
Fine Gael’s focus on using digital ID to force more stringent control of social media is also in line with sentiments in Brussels, with legacy parties in the EU capital regularly pushing for tighter big tech regulation at both the member-state and union level.
While the government has insisted that the tool is being designed around the issue of privacy, Ireland has had a poor record of digital safety and security, with one cyberattack on the HSE in 2021 compromising 80 per cent of the organisation’s IT infrastructure and resulting in sensitive medical information being published to the dark web.