Amid GDPR’s Implementation, FIDO Celebrates Growth

In the wake of the EU’s GDPR privacy law, the FIDO Alliance is celebrating the growth of its FIDO Europe Working Group. Launched last November with an initial membership of 12, including major companies like Daon, Gemalto, ING, and Verizon, the Working Group now has 22 member organizations.

The growth is perhaps no surprise, however, given the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect last Friday. FIDO’s authentication standards are designed to put a premium on privacy, and they “are optimised for compliance with the new regulation,” as the consortium put it in a growth update on its website. With so many organizations in Europe – not to mention the rest of the world – scrambling to ensure that they are in compliance with GDPR, it’s no wonder that FIDO’s Working Group has found some enthusiastic new members. And the same can be said of the Payment Services Directive 2 regulation that came into effect in the European Union earlier this year.

While this growth in FIDO’s European operations is important, it’s part of a bigger laundry list of recent successes that could easily fill a boastful diss track. As FIDO’s update notes, the organization also recently launched its FIDO2 authentication standards, which are poised to enable biometric and security key-based login on the web; and it welcomed both Amazon and Facebook as new members of its Board of Directors. It all points to the growing influence of FIDO and its specifications, and the strengthened user security that will result.

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May 31, 2018 – by Alex Perala