Context
ID Austria represents the further development of the Handy-Signatur and Bürgerkarte and replaced the legacy Handy-Signatur by 5 December 2023; it is now continuously being further developed. In Austria, users can identify with ID Austria in a modern, secure, and digital way. Thus, it is possible for a citizen to identify themselves securely online, use digital services, and conclude transactions online due to the continuous further development of ID Austria and the ongoing connection of other service providers such as the Federal Treasury, social security, the tax office, and insurance organisations. In addition to users and citizens, companies also benefit from numerous case studies of ID Austria in the corporate context through services provided by the Entrepreneur Service Portal. ID Austria is the Austrian implementation of the EU eIDAS Regulation and thus forms the basis for using online applications from other EU Member States. The central eIDAS node of the Republic of Austria already enables EU users to register for Austrian online applications with the electronic identity of their EU country of origin.
In summary, ID Austria aims to make access to public and private online services more convenient, faster, and safer for all users and to prepare Austria’s federal administration for the digital future.
Objectives
Users can use ID Austria’s electronic proof of identity to securely prove their identity vis-à-vis electronic applications, services, and procedures. The digital identities are issued by the state and can be used for authentication by both the administration and the private sector. ID Austria is the only national identity of Austria recognised for interoperability throughout Europe under the eIDAS Regulation.
Ongoing expansion of the digital identity with additional citizen attributes (such as main residence, photo, age, marital status) ensure ongoing added value for the users. ID Austria implements the highest possible compliance with security and data protection requirements and, through the most possible user-friendly integration with specialist and administrative applications on the web or mobile applications, raises the user experience to a contemporary level. The high data up-to-dateness of the provided attributes from the state registers provides additional added value for digital services and is intended to prevent identity abuse. The use of ID Austria significantly facilitates access to authorities and many service providers. By linking the personal data with the digital identity, stored data from the legal registers for the specific use case can be used very easily for the respective service provider use cases and transmitted directly without further manual input.
Implementation
The Digital Austria initiative includes, among other things, the Digital Austria Act, which reflects the federal government’s digital work programme. With more than 100 measures and different digitisation principles, the aim is to ensure that all members of the federal government work together towards one digital future. With corresponding strategies for Austria, action plans for a gradual implementation and a general government coordination or bundling of all available IT forces, the already started path of digital transformation in Austria is continuously being continued.