On 24.02 we celebrated Estonia’s Independence Day – we are now 103. On this day, Andrus was also hosting together with European Internet Forum a virtual debate “Digital Identity: Digital Citizenship & e-Governement”.

If there is an e-Estonia´s success story then it´s also based on single digital identities guaranteed by the government.

In Estonia, our digital identities are based on smart ID cards. We got our smart ID cards already in the year 2002. It was mandatory to have a smart ID card in Estonia. You can have your travel passport or not, but you have to have your smart ID card. But in the very beginning, we didn´t have so many possibilities to use our smart ID cards in a very smart way. It was good to use smart ID card to identify yourself on the border when travelling to Finland. It was also comfortable to use smart ID card to open envelopes.

When we got our smart ID cards, then we already had so-called X-road system or unified data exchange platform in Estonia, which allowed to cross-use information through different databases.

But nevertheless, it took six years for Estonia to collect our first one million digital signatures. In the year 2007, we implemented so-called once-only principle on the level of the government. It means state has right to ask for the same information only once. Second time is prohibited. State has to remember and with my permission to use this information once again. And this implementation of once-only principle gave real boost for usage of digital identities in Estonia. Very soon Estonians started to sign digitally 1,3 million times per week. And our population in Estonia is just 1,3 million inhabitants. Now, people in Estonia are using digital identities everywhere – to submit your personal income tax declaration, to change your driving license, to sign agreements and even to get results of your COVID-19 test.

We have even e-elections in Estonia. In fact, during our municipal elections in the year 2005 only 10 000 people voted electronically via the internet. But last time during our parliamentary elections, we collected even 44% of votes electronically. 

Many-many years ago, we figured out that just thanks to digital signatures we were able to save one working week in a year, which is equal to 2% of GDP, which is also equal to our defense expenditures. So we can say that in Estonia those investments for our defense are coming from digital signatures. 

We have many really good digital solutions in all the EU member states. And we have also the e-IDAS regulation, which allows mutual recognition of different digital identities. But nevertheless, it´s difficult to get cross-border access to those excellent digital services. Well, there is a really good example, which is the mutual recognition of e-prescriptions between Finland and Estonia. But I´m not able to provide too many that kind of good examples.

When using Single Sign On Services in Europe, we are mainly using Google, Facebook or Apple to get access to those services. Even our remote voting system in the Parliament is not based on single digital identities guaranteed by the government. 

I will be really happy when we will be able to get cross-border access to all kinds of digital services provided in different EU member states. That´s why all the member states have to have user-friendly digital identification systems and that´s why we also have to improve our e-IDAS system.