On the 12th floor of a Parisian building, a team of ten employees is preparing the release of France Identity, the official application, which will soon allow you to integrate your identity card data into your smartphone. In reality, there are around sixty to intervene, if we add the external developers and the two partner companies, in particular with regard to contactless technology.
Several credit-card-size IDs—the only compatible one—are on the desk. They are used to test each novelty, each change in the code of the application which has entered the active phase of its development.
Don’t look for it on the Apple App Store: the version for iPhone, in beta version, will only arrive in October. And, as for the Android version which is already visible on Google’s Play Store, only the first 2,500 subscribers will actually be able to use it.
Clearly, France Identity is not yet finalized or available to everyone – the official deployment is planned for 2023 – but several thousand French people are already using it, and are reporting their experience to the team of the National Agency for securities (ANTS) which uses this feedback to refine the application. Eventually, they could be 10,000 on iPhone and 100,000 on Android: these are the gauge limits in each of these two environments, for the applications under test.
Two conditions for using the France Identity application: an identity card in credit card format which contains a secure chip with your information (surname, first name, date of birth, photo, etc.) and a smartphone compatible with NFC technology, in other words the “contactless“. If you have an iPhone, all models are compatible since the iPhone 7 launched in 2016. On the Android side, all phones capable of running Android 8 are – in theory – compatible.
So here I am ready, with, in one hand, an iPhone with the beta version of France Identity installed, and in the other hand, a credit card size identity card. I launch the application for the first time, and it immediately offers me to associate my identity card. This association, to be done once and for all, takes less than five minutes (with some exceptions) and involves three steps: scanning the front panel, transferring data from the chip, and creating the secret code.
Let’s start with the scan of the front side: this amounts to placing the front of the identity card – the side with the photo – in front of the lens of the smartphone’s camera, making the outline of the card coincide with a frame drawn on the screen. Character recognition is immediate.
Second step: the transfer of data, thanks to contactless, from the chip integrated in the physical identity card. This is the step that cannot be done with previous “large format” laminated ID cards that do not contain a chip. Concretely, I approach the “credit card” identity card from my smartphone, and I put it in contact with the top of my phone (where the NFC chip is). This phase lasts a little longer than a contactless payment. Count five seconds before you see a blue tick appear on the screen, with this confirmation: “reading finished“.
The third step is to create and save your confidential code. This step requires identification. The application offers two options: either connect via France Identity – you may already use this service with the tax site or ameli, the health insurance site – or request a visit from a postman who will come to your address to certify that you are indeed the person corresponding to the identity card. The method may surprise in the all-digital era – especially since it is not immediate – but it will perhaps reassure users who were not born with the Internet.
In my case, verifying my identity via France Identity – which I already use – suits me perfectly. It therefore assumes that I identify myself as I do when I connect, for example, to the tax site. So here I am identified in the France Identity application to create and save my six-digit secret code. I stick the card to the smartphone again: the code is transferred from the phone to the card chip where it will remain stored. The association of my identity card is complete.
And now ? What are the possibilities ? Eventually, France Identity will make it possible to choose the data to be communicated. For example, only your name or date of birth, without disclosing the rest. Selective, “à la carte” disclosure. In the meantime, at launch, the first service offered is a tamper-proof, single-use proof of identity: a secure PDF document signed by the authorities, which you can send or provide, to open a bank account or rent a apartment, for example.
The objective is to increase security and trust and to avoid fraud and identity theft linked to the use of simple unverifiable photocopies of an identity card. Eventually, France Identity could be used in particular to obtain a proxy vote before an election, without having to go to the police station or the gendarmerie.
Be aware that for the most sensitive procedures, you will again need to physically bring the card closer to the phone and enter your secret code. Why ? To prove that it is you who are in charge. From November, France Identity will become an additional identity provider in France Connect. It will therefore become an additional means of identification to connect to the referenced services.
“It’s not Big Brother. It’s a new public service we’re building.”
Anne-Gaëlle Baudouin, Director of ANTS (National Agency for Secure Documents)at franceinfo
We understand: this new application is destined to become the digital equivalent of the physical identity card (which we will nevertheless continue to need often). In particular, she needs to gain the confidence of the French. This is one of the reasons why the application works in decentralized mode: no information passes through the Internet.
The database is your identity card which acts as cold storage (“cold storage“), according to the terminology specific to crypto-currencies. Interactions are limited to exchanges between the physical card and the telephone: “It’s not Big Brother. It’s not the state that imposes somethingexplains Anne-Gaëlle Baudouin, director of the National Agency for Secure Securities (ANTS), which is leading the project. We need to acquire this confidence and a need also to have confidence in the fact that our application is ergonomic, easy to use. Afterwards, the uses – and there are many of them – will come, and I know that it is also eagerly awaited by many of us“.
Question: could the France Identity application, for example, be used to prove the majority of a user of pornographic sites while ARCOM has given formal notice to the five main adult sites, accessible in France? “It’s not in our roadmapanswers Anne-Gaëlle Baudouin. Our objective is to enable our fellow citizens to prove their identity in a secure manner. It is not to make a tool for controlling access to websites“.
Will the app be able to integrate other official documents? Not the driving license as such, because it does not contain a chip, but a “right to drive” could, one day, be integrated into the telephone. On the other hand, as an extension of the identity card, the team is working on an extension to the passport – which already contains a chip – and to residence permits, provided that a certain number of technical and legal obstacles are removed: “it’s really a new public service that we are building“concludes Anne-Gaëlle Baudouin.