TrustED project tests Europe’s digital identity privacy model

Europe’s digital identity ambitions are approaching an important deadline. By the end of 2026, EU Member States are expected to make European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallets available to citizens. What follows is potentially even more consequential. Very large online platforms will be required to accept an EUDI Wallet when users choose to authenticate with one, while banks, telecom providers and other regulated sectors face their own acceptance requirements. But making wallets available and requiring organizations to accept them is only part of building a functioning digital identity ecosystem. How does Europe ensure people can prove who they are without unnecessarily exposing personal information? How can sensitive data be used across organizations and borders while remaining under the control of the individual or institution that holds it? And as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly dependent on large datasets, can organizations collaborate on AI without pooling sensitive information in centralized repositories? Those questions extend beyond wallet interoperability. They get to the heart of Europe’s broader vision for digital sovereignty: enabling identity and data to be used while preserving privacy, control and trust. An EU-funded research project called TrustED is testing what that model could look like in practice. The project received a boost in visibility this month when CORDIS selected TrustED as one of 12 initiatives featured in its September “Project of the Month” selection. Identity meets data sovereignty TrustED — Enabling Trustworthy European Data Spaces through Self-Sovereign Identity and Privacy Preserving Technologies — is funded through the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 101168467. Its mission is to enable individuals and organizations to extract greater value from data while preserving privacy within Europe’s emerging data-space ecosystem. That places TrustED at the intersection of two important European initiatives: the EUDI Wallet and the development of European data spaces. Connecting identity with broader data sharing introduces additional risks. Identity theft and data leakage remain concerns, while AI creates another challenge because training and analytics can depend on large quantities of potentially sensitive information. Sharing those datasets across organizations and borders can create privacy, regulatory and sovereignty concerns. TrustED is attempting to address those problems by combining digital identity with technologies designed to minimize how much underlying information needs to be exposed or transferred. The project brings together organizations from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Turkey, including Gradiant, InfoCert, Fraunhofer ISST, Fraunhofer AISEC, Tree Technology, CyberSocial Lab, Promptly Health, Sestek, Fundación Cibervoluntarios and Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra, with Fondazione Mondo Digitale participating as an associated partner. The wallet is only one layer At the identity layer, TrustED incorporates the EUDI Wallet model, allowing users to prove their identity and share verified information. But the architecture goes further. TrustED combines self-sovereign identity with privacy-enhancing technologies including zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. These technologies address different parts of the same problem: how to verify information or extract value from it while exposing as little of the underlying data as possible. A zero-knowledge proof, for example, can allow someone to demonstrate that a particular requirement has been satisfied without revealing all the information behind that assertion. The principle is straightforward: prove what needs to be proven rather than automatically sharing the data behind the proof. TrustED applies a similar philosophy to AI through federated learning. Rather than moving datasets into a centralized repository to train an AI model, computation can occur where the data resides. Participating organizations can contribute to a shared model without transferring their underlying raw datasets. That approach could become increasingly important as Europe attempts to reconcile the economic value of data and AI with its privacy and digital sovereignty objectives. Real-world pilots test the model TrustED is testing these technologies with real users in two very different environments. In Spain, Fundación Cibervoluntarios put the TrustED digital wallet in the hands of more than 70 volunteers across different age groups. Participants used the wallet to issue, store and share verifiable identity and volunteering credentials, while researchers examined their expectations and concerns around usability, security, privacy and trust. A second pilot in Portugal moved into healthcare. Working with Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra, TrustED validated a federated-learning platform for analyzing and predicting viral respiratory infections, including influenza, COVID-19 and RSV. The architecture allows institutions to collaborate on AI models without centralizing or transferring their underlying clinical data. Together, the pilots test two sides of Europe’s digital sovereignty model: whether ordinary people can comfortably control and share digital credentials, and whether institutions can extract value from sensitive data without giving up control of it. Privacy-preserving technology can work technically but still fail if citizens do not trust or understand it. Similarly, data sovereignty means little if organizations ultimately have to surrender control of their data to participate in collaborative analytics. From policy to working infrastructure TrustED’s significance goes beyond its CORDIS recognition. As Europe moves from EUDI Wallet regulation toward deployment, the challenge is shifting from defining digital sovereignty to making it work in practice. TrustED is testing several pieces of that model together: digital wallets and verifiable credentials for identity, privacy-enhancing technologies for minimizing disclosure, and federated learning for using sensitive data without centralizing it. Its pilots also highlight a critical point: technical compliance alone will not guarantee success. Citizens need to understand and trust the controls they are given, while institutions need privacy-preserving technologies that work within real operational and regulatory environments. The EUDI Wallet may provide Europe with a trusted identity layer. Projects such as TrustED are testing what comes next: whether people and organizations can actually use identity and data without giving up control of either.