People’s efforts to develop an independent digital identity are also being propelled by their need to verify and authenticate their data – which may become, crucially, much more profitable.
Think of your digital ID as the analogue equivalent of a driver’s licence – except that you own it exclusively and are in charge. Self-sovereign identity starts with this idea.
Self-Sovereign Identity
For the past two decades there’s been a growing movement to return identities back to the people who use them so they can own them — digital identity is a ripe area for this, and is embodied in more Self Sovereign Identity (SSI).
In this way, SSI places individuals at the centre of identity ecosystems, empowering them to control and authenticate their digital personae themselves, and to direct how their identifiers are used. This reverses the prevailing pseudo-cosmology, empowering individuals’ privacy, consent and autonomy.
The main advantage that SSI holds against previous identity models is that it’s built on decentralisation with peer-to-peer networks as their cornerstone. These enable you to share verified credentials (VC) without any trusted entity being involved in the sharing logic. This makes you a lot more safe and also resilient. On top of that, the model is very scalable and opens up a business model for SSI functionalities, making it applicable for industries as diverse as banking, the healthcare, the humanitarian sector – and beyond.
Privacy by Design
With digital IDs transitioning from the fringes of tech development into the mainstream, ensuring that they are used in a transparent and secure manner will be critical. But for this to be effective, privacy, security and user-experience concerns must be thought through and addressed as part of design activities rather than as afterthoughts; when doing so, good design can help ensure that solutions retain their utility while managing for disutility in the areas of privacy.
Centralised models entail one company that holds all of a user’s information: identification companies such as large tech companies (eg, Google or Facebook), acting as single identity owners. Although these models do have benefits for users, since a single company handles all the data, the fact that they store all the critical information of a user accounts might be a temptation for hackers and other identity thieves.
The success of digital identity depends on defeating fraud while delivering a fantastic customer experience to consumers. And this requires innovation, such as AI-based fraud detection, including liveness detection (to detect deepfakes, more video or voice recordings created to appear as another person), and new technologies we do not yet know.
Transparency
They must be verifiable and usable across platforms and interfaces – and able to be read the same way by humans. This means new models for developing, maintaining and governing a learning record system that enable standards of interoperability without rules and regulations that are inflexible, difficult to change, or physically duplicative, and still enable easy updates of data. If successful, it would be a historical shift. Companies and governments may follow an adaptable learning economy if it produces bottom-line returns for them in a new infrastructure.
At least we, society, will have to accept it with relatively open minds. Otherwise it will remain the province of the various surveillance societies that would exploit the citizen while offering the gift of convenience and efficiency to the enterprise and government alike. People may – indeed must – instead bring their own ID – the concepts of BYOI (bring your own identity) enterprises or governments cease to offer their IDs for themselves. This time the power is flowed back to the citizens – and digital identity will be connected to privacy by design and citizen empowerment as well.
Trust
Throughout many parts of the digital world, such as signing up for an online service, users are regularly asked to already prove who they are. Doing so could involve multiple steps, which could include having to enter one of multiple passwords or filling in a registration form – and then opening up the possibility that the credentials used can easily be guessed or stolen.
Self-sovereign ID means putting users firmly in the driver’s seat of their own identities, granting them ownership and control over their data at all times, without requiring a third party for verification purposes. This improves the process of proving identity as well as user experience.
Digital identities upon our online avatars that could be anything that can be tied back to the individual. This includes logins and passwords, credit or debit accounts, social-media profiles or bank statements. Digital identities let you into websites or apps; allow you to electronically sign documents; and verify for various reasons that you are who you say you are (for example, when buying alcohol or cocaine, or when registering at a university).
