Assessing Poor Adoption of the eID in Germany

Personal e-services guarded by eID remain foreign to public organizations and citizens in many countries. In this context, Germany is an interesting case to study. While much of the e-government adoption research focuses on developing countries, Germany is a technologically advanced and wealthy country, close to the Nordic countries with widely accepted eIDs for private and public e-services. Still, Germany experiences rather poor adoption of its eID. Because most public services in Germany are provided through municipalities, we asked the municipalities why they rarely provide e-services with an option for citizens to identify themselves with the eID. The result is ten reasons of poor adoption of e-services and the eID, and a background story.