ETD

• EU digital wallet,eIDAS2.0,digital identity

This thesis examines whether the emerging European Digital Identity Wallet framework is developing as genuinely privacy-preserving public infrastructure or as a new layer of identity centralization, with major implications for data protection, cybersecurity and platform governance.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 requires Member States to provide at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet. 3 EU jurisdictions, Ireland, Estonia and Germany, are selected as contrast cases in order to analyse how different digital-administrative traditions interpret and implement the same EU legal framework.
The analysis focuses primarily on eIDAS2.0, the GDPR and the emerging cybersecurity certification environment for EUDI wallets, while also examining adjacent implications under the Digital Services Act, especially in relation to age verification; and considers the relevance of the DMA, the Data Governance Act and the AI Act, where these bear on identity governance, interoperability, market power or automated assessment.
South Korea is introduced as a non-EU reference case to test whether the EU’s legal commitment to selective disclosure, privacy by design and rights-based governance marks a meaningful departure from other advanced digital identity systems, or whether dynamics of function creep and routine identification remain likely despite stronger formal safeguards.