Digital Trust Label

The Digital Trust Label

The Swiss Digital Initiative and its partners have developed the first Digital Trust Label that denotes the trustworthiness of a digital service in clear, visual and plain, non-technical language for everyone to understand. With the Label, consumers can be assured of the trustworthiness of the digital service they consume.

The Digital Trust Label acts as a combination of a bio Label and nutrition fact table for the digital world. The Label shows that mandatory criteria are fulfilled by a digital service, while at the same time giving users more information and transparency about four dimensions of the digital service:

Need for a Digital Trust Label

Whether in our personal or professional life, we look for trust to feel at ease and engage with others easily. The same applies to the digital world. Growing complexity and opaqueness, coupled with various scandals around data breaches and discrimination by algorithmic systems, are fueling mistrust in digital services. Now is the time to establish digital trust and harness the beneficial potential of digital technologies for our societies.

The Label Development

Digital Trust cannot be defined by one actor alone, but can only be the result of the close collaboration of all relevant actors: academia, civil society, consumer protection, the private and public sector. This is why the SDI involved all relevant stakeholders in the development and made the criteria and development process as transparent as possible.

The Label is understood as an ongoing and collaborative effort to strengthen trust in a digital service through increased understanding and transparency. While other organizations around the globe are pursuing similar initiatives, SDI and its Digital Trust Label are the most developed initiative from 50+ similar initiatives worldwide as a study revealed.

The Label development is an iterative process, hence, it will be continuously developed. In 2022, the first version of the label officially launched.

Governance

The Digital Trust Label is governed by two principal governance bodies: the Label Expert Committee (LEC) & the Label Certification Committee (LCC)

The Label Expert Committee (LEC)

The Label Expert Committee (LEC) was and continues to be dedicated to the development of the label by formulating recommendations to the SDI Board.

Between 2019 - 2022, the LEC consisted of 10 experts from academia, economy, data and consumer protection, legal, human rights and digital ethics to represent a diverse and inclusive expert view.

During the development of the first version of the Digital Trust Label, the LEC’s work was coordinated by the EPFL Center for Digital Trust (C4DT).

To further improve the Digital Trust Label, additional experts were recruited through an Open Call to the Label Expert Committee.

Members of the LEC 2022:

Marcel Blattner, Principal Data Scientist and Team Leader, ETH Swiss Data Science Center

Nikki Böhler, Director, Opendata.ch

Sophia Ding, Managing Consultant, Head Trustworthy AI & Responsible Tech, AWK Group

Maximilian Groth, Co-Founder & CEO, Decentriq

Michael Kende, Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a Senior Advisor at Analysys Mason

Rodolphe Koller, Editor in Chief, ICTjournal

Diego Kuonen, CEO, Statoo Consulting & Professor of Data Science, GSEM, University of Geneva

Patrick Schaller, Senior Scientist System Security, ETHZ

Mitchell Scherr, CEO, Assured Cyber Protection

Manouchehr Shamsrizi, Co-Founder, gamelab.berlin Humboldt-Universität's Cluster of Excellence and Co-Founder RetroBrain R&D

Martin Steiger, Partner Steiger Legal, Co-Founder Datenschutzpartner

Tuulia Timonen, Head of PSC Service Excellence, Posti Group

Leila Toplic, Head of Emerging Technologies Initiative, NetHope

Charlotte van Ooijen, Associate Director Digital Government and Data, The Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness and Social Renewal

Label Certification Committee (LCC)

Independent experts in the Label Certification Committee review the Audit reports and give their recommendation on awarding the Digital Trust Label, thereby adding an additional layer of security.

Members of the LCC 2022:

Deepak Banssal, Director, Meaning Quotient GmbH

Philippe Schwab, Information and Security Specialist, Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), Competence Centre for IT and Digital Society

Dr. Nitin Kumar, Data Consulting Partner, Meaning Quotient GmbH

Coordination and support EPFL:

Martin Rajman, Scientific Advisor and Senior Scientist EPFL

Imad Aad, Project Manager, Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) EPFL

The Digital Trust Label Test Partners

Seven test partners from the public and private sector were involved in the project to pilot the criteria:

AXA, Canton Vaud, SwissRe, Credit Suisse, Booking.com, IBM Switzerland and Swisscom

The Digital Trust Label - Document Downloads:

Report on Second Public Consultation Process - June 2021

Report on Global Initiatives Mapping - May 2021

Label Catalogue Criteria - Draft Version - April 2021

Recommendations of the Label Expert Committee - Executive Summary - December 2020