“Paterna takes another step in the digital transformation of its municipal services,” says its mayorJuan A. Sagredo, very proud. The municipality located in the Huerta region of Valencia has just announced that it will be one of the first places in Spain to incorporate the digital DNI into citizen services, “allowing residents to identify themselves quickly, safely and comfortably through the official MiDNI application”.
And what does this mean? If you have done online procedures with the public administration you can get an idea. A journey through the desert: you open the website of the ministry on duty, choose the Cl@ve system and the page falls. You reload, opt for Autosign, but your operating system decides that today is not a good day to cooperate. You try in Safari and it doesn’t work, you jump to Chrome and Java error. You desperately install Firefox and, when you finally get the program to start, the Cl@ve mobile app does not read the QR code because the camera plugin fails. Or something falls. Or the session expires due to inactivity. It makes you want to throw your laptop out the window and register yourself in a cave.
The Spanish digital bureaucracy, theoretically designed to make our lives easier, sometimes trips over itself and transforms into a hostile labyrinth. No wonder the mayor of Paterna celebrates that his administrations integrate the new digital ID in their municipal management systems. It’s common sense.
From Self-Signature to the simplicity of the QR code
Although the current problems are not security, they do sometimes involve zero usability scenarios. Citizens do not need advanced military-grade cryptography to request a travel certificate, but for the system to work first time, when the urgency of check-in prevails.
The new digital DNI, framed in the project of the European Digital Identity Wallet o Digital Wallet and based on the eIDAS 2.0 regulationpromises to rewrite some things. For example, you do not carry real photos or encrypted documents, but rather a biometric authentication system is used that eliminates intermediaries. To understand how it changes at the digital, face-to-face level of life, this is the summary:
|
Procedure |
The old system (Cl@ve / Autofirma) |
The new system (Digital DNI) |
|---|---|---|
|
Access |
Requires passwords, temporary SMS pins that expire, or third-party apps that constantly crash. |
Facial recognition (FaceID) or fingerprint directly on your mobile phone. |
|
Document signing |
It requires installing local programs like Autofirma, updating Java, and dealing with browser compatibility. |
Instant digital signature by reading a QR code on the screen. |
|
Security |
Exposed to phishing attacks via SMS or theft of traditional access keys. |
End-to-end encryption supported by European Union standards. |
Improvements for the residents of Paterna
And what does this mean? Well, translated into day-to-day life, into direct usefulness for the average citizen. From now on, carrying out transactions at the town hall requires just three taps on the phone screen.
- Instant registrationFor example. Request, download and present the registration certificate immediately for any urgent procedure.
- Payment of fees (without obstacles). Settle local taxes, fines or sports activity fees without going through payment gateways from the last century.
- General instances: present official writings addressed to the council using only the biometrics of the smartphone.
The council has modified its positions in the Citizen Information and Attention Service (SIAC) and has implemented QR code readers compatible with MiDNI. Mayor Sagredo highlighted that the priority objective of this measure is to democratize digital access. “We want an administration that solves problems, not creates them.” What is clear is that digital sovereignty does not consist of filling public offices with computers. It is rather a matter of giving back lost time to citizens.
How to prepare for the digital DNI
And, by the way, for anyone who wants to start using this technology, follow these three basic steps:
- First of all, make sure your smartphone has NFC technology (the same one you use to pay with your mobile) and that you have activated biometric security systems (fingerprint or facial recognition). It is almost certain that it will incorporate it (and the vast majority of iPhones and Android phones from 2018 onwards come with it as standard).
- Get the physical DNIe. To download and configure the digital DNI in your virtual wallet for the first time, you will need your physical DNI (version 3.0 or 4.0) and its corresponding PIN number. If you lost it, you can restore it at any National Police station, at an automatic terminal without an appointment.
- Download the official application. Of course, only access the Spanish Government applications intended for the Digital Wallet in the official markets (Google Play Store either Apple App Store) to avoid impersonation fraud.
Images | Own capture / Ayto de Paerna
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