With the growth of electronic methods of conducting business and public affairs, identities and the systems that manage them must be interoperable. A citizen with an electronic identity from one European country must be able to access e-government facilities elsewhere in Europe if the aim of mobility of labour is to be realised.

By the same token, if the benefits of investment in electronic service delivery are to be exploited to the full, e-health systems and e-commerce systems need to be able to recognise and accept identities regardless of which European country they were issued in. Research into the interoperability of public key infrastructures (PKI) revealed different levels of concern that must be addressed including: technological, policy, legal and regulatory. The objectives of this research are to identify the commonalities among privacy policies in EU countries, to find the variances in privacy policies among EU countries and to determine the requirements for the development of interoperable systems for Privacy and Identity Management Systems.

IMPACT is a project to be developed under the European Union’s Framework 6 programme for Research and Development.