Translated with DeepL
On 16 September 2025, Felix Gille, health policy expert at the University of Zurich and co-author of the study, took part in the "International Conference on Trustworthy Digital Infrastructure" at the renowned Alan Turing Institute in London. The fifth edition of this conference brought together researchers, practitioners and developers from around the world to discuss the latest innovations and challenges in creating trustworthy digital systems.
A key topic was the increasing reliance on hyperscale cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, especially in countries of the global South.
The conference shed light on how digital public infrastructures (DPI) are not only a technical challenge, but increasingly a geopolitical one. Data sovereignty, legal independence and the need for federated, locally controlled infrastructures were at the centre of the discussions.
Gille conducted research at the University of Zurich on health policy, governance and public trust in the use of data in healthcare systems. There, he led the research project funded by the Digital Society Initiative (DSI) on the conceptual equivalence of public trust in national electronic health records in Switzerland and neighbouring countries.
He has also been working at the Federal Chancellery in the Digital Transformation and ICT Steering (DTI) division as an Enterprise Architect for Trustworthiness and Identification for around six months, where he contributes to the development of a trustworthy data ecosystem.
His research shows: Without public trust in the actors and activities of digital systems, there is a lack of social legitimisation - be it for electronic patient records or for the digital public infrastructure in general. The current vote on the introduction of e-ID in Switzerland clearly shows how controversial the topic is in this country too. With the Digital Trust study, the SATW and the University of Zurich have carried out fundamental work in a politically and technologically highly charged field.
Participation in the conference underlines the role of the SATW as a bridge builder between research, practice and politics, but also as a driving force for a technology policy that places sovereignty and trust at the centre.
