On March 7, the Swiss population rejected the new eID law. A new bill will therefore have to be put in place by the confederation. This strategy will have to consider the legitimate fears of the citizens communicated by this popular decision, in particular the fact that commercial interests must not jeopardize the sovereignty of personal data.

This is not an obstacle to the digitalization of our country: solutions already exist on the market.

As a private, 100% independent and Swiss ELCA Group company, we take note of this decision. For many years, the concepts of sovereignty, security and protection of privacy have always been at the center of our concerns and we have prepared ourselves for this eventuality.

The trustID technology is already being used by companies or cantons to manage the lifecycle and distribution of white-label identities themselves. We therefore fully respond to the popular desire not to entrust identity management to a private company. It is up to the cantons to decide whether to develop and maintain their own solutions or to integrate a product on the market, developed entirely in Switzerland in open source code, which has proven itself in the field. This approach is unique and gives a real alternative to identities delivered by a private company.

Without new legislation, private providers will still be able to continue to provide identities for commercial services, as they already do today. The use of an electronic identity enables citizens to secure their activities in the digital world:

• E-business transactions
• Electronic signature or personal attribute management

Our electronic identity trustID is already available free of charge to any citizen who wants it (https://my.trustid.ch/). This allows access to the services that already trust us as well as many more to come.

Nor are we in the situation of a digital Wild West as invoked by some. Regulations already exist today at the confederation level for digital identities. It is a question of applying them.

We anticipated this by applying for trustID the only federal certification that exists today, and will remain so for many years to come, that of the OFSP for the electronic patient record.

trustID is today the only electronic identity for citizens certified according to the Federal Law on the Electronic Patient File.

This certification obliges us to keep the bar high in terms of security and protection of privacy.

The situation related to COVID has demonstrated the urgency of digitizing several processes, including in the health sector. The subject of test and vaccination certificates shows the urgency to secure these sensitive data, already used fraudulently today. We hope that the confederation and the cantons will listen to the voice of the people on the protection of their personal data and will now demand that this data be protected by trusted identities, thus certified by the FOPH.