Digital identity in Australia

Digital identity is used in Australia by residents to validate who they are over digital media, such as over the Internet.

While many organisations use their own mechanisms, increasingly, aggregated digital identities are in use. Many Australian organisations leverage popular ubiquitous Internet identities such as those provided by social login services including Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn to perform the following functions:

• Single sign-on to help users avoiding creating new user names and passwords for each site.
• To provide some basic validation of identity
• To provide some integration, especially with social media, e-mail and contacts
• To identify the natural person behind a transaction for statutory purposes such as a monetary transfer

In addition to these services, in order to validate identities in Australia additional services are used, such as government, and bank digital identities.