Share What Is Needed: A Better Way to Use Verified Information
Information doesn't need to be copied everywhere to be useful. It needs to be confirmed by a trusted source, with your agreement, and only for the purpose you approved.
Reliable services need reliable information. The usual way to get it is to ask you for it, again, along with a copy of a document to prove it.
There's a better way. Information doesn't need to be copied from one place to another to become useful. It needs to be confirmed, by a source that can be trusted, with your agreement.
That principle shapes how TRIDENT handles information, and it puts a clear limit on what TRIDENT is.
The record stays where it belongs
TRIDENT isn't a national copy of everything Government knows about you, and it isn't a pipeline moving records between institutions.
For national identity information, the Electoral and Boundaries Commission remains the authority. Every other institution remains the authority for the records under its own mandate: a licensing body for licences, a registry for registrations, a health authority for health records. Those systems and those records stay exactly where they are.
What TRIDENT provides is the identity layer that lets a service know who it's dealing with, and the means to confirm identity details against the authoritative record rather than a photocopy.
Nothing is shared without your say
Before identity details are passed to a service, you'll be asked. You'll see what's being requested and by whom, and you can decline.
Consent is also specific rather than general. Agreeing that one service can confirm your address for one purpose isn't a standing permission for anything else, and it isn't a permission other services inherit.
Two ways information can reach a service
The first is through your identity. With your consent, a participating service can receive confirmed identity details rather than asking you to supply and prove them.
The second is through your hands. Institutions that are the authority on their own records will be able to issue them as digital credentials you hold in your Mobile ID Wallet and present when needed. Here the information doesn't travel between institutions at all. You carry it, and you decide when to show it.
Both paths coexist. Which one fits depends on the service, the information and the policies that apply.
Authorised, not open
Being connected to TRIDENT doesn't give an organisation general access to anything.
Each participating service is approved for a defined purpose and permitted to request only what that purpose requires. A service authorised to confirm your address is not thereby able to see anything else, and every request is recorded.
What this changes in practice
Consider applying for something today. You write your name, address and date of birth on a form, attach a copy of your ID, someone at the other end reads it and types it into a system.
Three things can go wrong there: the copy can be altered, the typing can introduce an error, and the copy ends up stored somewhere it doesn't need to be.
When the same details are confirmed through your identity instead, with your consent, the service receives information that came from the authoritative record. Fewer forms for you, better data for them, and no photocopy sitting in a file.
Curious about credentials you hold yourself?
The article Your Identity, in Your Hands explains how digital credentials work and how you choose what to show.