A Taxonomy of Government Approaches Towards Online Identity Management

A government's approach towards establishing the online identity of its citizens is often subject to heated debate. This debate is sometimes obscured by the lack of clarity regarding the specific approach that a government adopts towards identity management. We propose a taxonomy for the type of identity management that a government can pursue. Our taxonomy identifies three essential approaches: a decentralized, a federal, and a centralized type. We illustrate our taxonomy using three countries that have approaches characteristic of each type: Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands respectively.