Motivation & Project Description

The European society, like other societies globally, is at the advent of explosive growth and maturity in the digital society. This brings to the European Union an opportunity to emerge from the current recession more productive, innovative, competitive and knowledge driven than before. However, the acceptance and uptake of new and modern services and the growth of innovation and productivity is hampered by a number of obstacles including the lack of trust in the online environment. The Trust in Digital Life community, formed by leading industry partners and institutes, considers trust as a priority prerequisite where people can count on by default. Trustworthy ICT solutions must become a commodity enforced by citizens and law.

Trust is important and currently, there are no organizations and activities promising to solve the major issues within the ICT ecosystem. The Trust in Digital Life community has its membership, mission, plan and capabilities to resolve the issues and will research, pilot and promote innovative ICT environments and technologies to solve the important issues in the four pillars.

The Trust in Digital Life community encourages the industry to develop innovative information and communication technologies, enabling consumers and enterprises to judge for themselves if their devices, applications and services are trustworthy enough to protect them from internet threats.

Industry has the ambition to provide these technologies for an affordable price to the market. The Trust in Digital Life community will support the industry and government in achieving a take-up rate of trustworthy ICT by the following means:

• raising awareness through the monitoring of the impact of incidents;
• raising awareness through the definition and testing of interoperable frameworks for eauthentication services in public and private domains;
• through defining end-to-end technology platforms for user controlled data life cycle management;
• through defining end-to-end technology platforms for mobile service integrity.

Establishing trust is essential to releasing the full potential of an information-based economy. It is imperative that within the European context protection of privacy and other basic related human rights of citizens in the future is enhanced and guaranteed which must also apply to the digital world. The trust paradigm shift will be explored towards the transparent payment for trust scheme for a fair treatment of privacy and trust needs. The paradigm shift includes the move to the Cloud and “things” attached to the Cloud, both of which have introduced new trust and privacy challenges to be addressed, as services and devices are moved away from direct access.