Digital access for the youngest

Just before the summer, the Research Center participated in a workshop on digital ID for youth. The workshop was organized by the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency and was held at their premises in beautiful surroundings in Leikanger. The goal of the gathering was to make access to digital ID better for our youngest citizens.

Today, young people can access health services via Norway’s digital identification application, BankID. This provides a high level of security, but requires parental consent and can be a challenging process. MinID is a security level lower, and is something the youth can obtain themselves. MinID functions as a digital ID that says something about who you are, but does not give access to programs that handle sensitive data, such as health data. The workshop demonstrated how demanding it can be to create MinID on your own as a 13-year-old. The goal of the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency is to adapt the use so that young people are not dependent on help from their parents/guardians. Making electronic ID available to the youngest is an important step away from digital exclusion, facilitating so that as many people as possible have access to the health services that exist and are essential for the implementation of the services. For programmes developed by UngMeiring, among others, there will be a need for a high level of security.

The workshop was attended by representatives from: Bufdir, Municipality of Bergen, Municipality of Oslo, Norwegian Health Network, Western Norway Regional Health Authority, Directorate for eHealth, Digdir and the Directorate for Health and Social Affairs. Kristin Hogstad Bruvik (project manager for UngMeistring) and Robin Gulseth (consultant at the Research Center) participated from the Research Center. The gathering resulted in a number of measures that the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency will implement during 2023 with high priority.

UngMeistring and the Research Center would like to thank the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency for an engaging and important gathering and look forward to following the process.