Every time you log in, sign up or confirm your age online, a bit of your personal data goes somewhere. The EU-funded TrustED project wants to change the rules of that game: it combines a digital identity wallet, federated learning and advanced encryption so that people and organisations can share data securely and still keep their privacy. The team has already tried it out with volunteers and in hospitals — and at the end you can check how well you look after your own digital identity.
Technology built on data has the potential to improve the quality of life of everyone in Europe. Digital identity and data sharing may play a key role in the continent's digital future, from dealing with public services to taking part in research. The problem is that the road there is not exactly smooth. Before people and institutions are ready to share information freely, some serious security, privacy and trust barriers still have to be overcome.
In other words, the benefits are clear, but so are the risks. If users do not feel safe, they will simply hold back, and the promise of data-driven services stays on paper.
According to the project, the barriers standing between Europeans and a trustworthy digital future come down to four main issues:
Each of these problems on its own is enough to make people cautious. Put together, they explain why so much valuable data remains locked away and unused.
TrustED is tackling these obstacles by developing a secure and interoperable digital identity solution that allows safe data collaboration across data spaces. The project follows a privacy-by-design approach, which means privacy is built into the system from the very beginning instead of being added as an afterthought.
At the heart of the framework lies self-sovereign digital identity: the idea that the person, not a platform, controls their own identity. It is combined with trustworthy data analytics, so that citizens and organisations can work with other organisations while keeping the privacy and trust of everyone involved.
A key building block is the EU Digital Identity Wallet. It is a secure digital app through which users can prove who they are and share verified personal data across borders. Instead of sending copies of documents around, the user decides which verified information to present and to whom.
Identity is only half the story. The other half is what happens to data once it is shared. Here TrustED relies on privacy-preserving federated learning, a method in which data analysis takes place without sharing raw data. The information stays where it is, and only the results of the analysis travel.
The framework also makes datasets easier to discover through data spaces, so that organisations can find out what data exists without exposing it. On top of that, it uses advanced privacy-enhancing technologies, known as PETs. These include zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. All of them serve the same purpose: to protect data privacy while still allowing efficient computation and trustworthy verification.
The project team has tested its technology in two main use cases. The first was a self-sovereign identity wallet for volunteers and non-governmental organisations, designed to manage digital credentials in a secure and user-friendly way.
The researchers looked closely at how users interact with the tool at each step: creating a verifiable identity credential, generating a volunteer credential and presenting these credentials to NGOs. This kind of testing shows whether a secure solution is also simple enough for everyday use.
The next stage of work is to improve the volunteers' credential flows with dedicated web interfaces. The team will also integrate the wallet with a minimum viable data space, where volunteers will be able to access a dashboard listing volunteering activities or opportunities made available by NGOs.
The second use case moved into a far more sensitive area: federated learning for the secure analysis of clinical data. In this pilot, the researchers evaluated the TrustED federated learning platform and how it could support secure, collaborative clinical research in real hospital environments.
The questions were practical. Does the platform fit existing clinical research workflows? Are its governance and approval processes appropriate? And how trustworthy do stakeholders consider its federated learning operations to be?
The next stage here is to bring the pieces together: the data space components, an organisational wallet that authenticates participants in the data space, the federated learning service and a portal that gives participants access.
The project manager sums up the goal in a single sentence: “Our mission at TrustED is to develop solutions that enable users and organisations to extract the maximum potential from data, while ensuring privacy, within the new paradigm of European data spaces,” says Alex Cuenca.
TrustED delivers practical tools and methods that help organisations design, deploy and assess digital technologies with higher levels of security, reliability, accountability and user trust. In this way, the project contributes to a digital ecosystem that is more trustworthy, more transparent and more focused on people.
TrustED shows that sharing data and protecting privacy do not have to be opposites. By combining the EU Digital Identity Wallet with federated learning and privacy-enhancing technologies, the project lets people prove who they are and lets organisations analyse data without exposing it. Tests with volunteers and in hospitals are the first step towards putting these solutions into everyday use.
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