The Future of Digital Identity - New Report for Your Viewing

On 28 April 2020, the Blockchain Research Institute co-hosted a webinar, “The Future of Digital Identity,” with Hyperledger. It was the third webinar in our New Directions for Government series. Today, we released a report transcript of that webinar discussion, with some elaboration on key themes and topics.

Our webinar guests were amazing: Brian Behlendorf, general manager for blockchain, healthcare, and identity at the Linux Foundation and executive director of Hyperledger; Stephen Curran, a principal of Cloud Compass Computing and a software developer and DevOps veteran; and Nathan George, senior director of engineering for the protocol team at Kiva Microfunds.

I had the pleasure of moderating the discussion. Our conversation covered all the issues and opportunities around digital identity and personal data. We discussed the self-sovereign identity, verifiable credentials, immunity passports, blockchain-based wallets, and more.

I’ve been talking about this topic for thirty years now, and I’ve watched the paradigm shift from something fairly benign—paper-based and compartmentalized—to something downright creepy.

I was thinking back to when I learned to drive as a 16-year-old. Back then, your data was stored in company or agency siloes—and it was all physical. It wasn’t digitized. It wasn’t stored on computers networked together. If you got stopped by the police on the road, they’d ask for your driver’s license, but I don’t think they had access to your driving record, let alone your criminal record, and they sure couldn’t access or ask you for your medical record or your credit card number.

Now, as all these pieces of information turn into bits, the institutions that have power are able to capture them and correlate them. So, I want to say again, “Houston, we have a problem here.” It’s not a simple thing. There are five dimensions to this problem,

1.    We create the data, others own it and control it. That means we don’t have access to it, to plan our lives. Imagine if we had access to all this rich healthcare data, or transactional data, or location data or something like that, how that could help us.

2.    It means that we can’t monetize this data. The big tech firms that collect it—they’re becoming the most wealthy institutions in all of history. The last time I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jaron Lanier said that there are close to two billion people in the world who could double their income if they had the ability to monetize their data. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I do know that this data is worth a lot, and we create it, but we don’t get anything for it.

3.    Our data isn’t secure. It’s going to be hacked, or it has been hacked or lost, and yet we’re responsible for picking up the pieces and cleaning up our reputations.

4.    We can’t use our data for any social purpose such as in a pandemic.

5.    Our privacy is being undermined. People say to me, “Don, privacy is dead—get over it. If you’ve got nothing to hide, what’s your problem?” This is stupidity because privacy is the foundation of freedom. All this data represents us, our identities, and we need to get it back, so that we can manage it responsibly.

If you think that we should “just get over it,” check out the social scoring system in China. If you do something bad according to the government, pay a parking ticket or, God forbid, go on a demonstration, then all of a sudden, your kid doesn’t get into a good school. You have no idea why.

So, the stakes here are very high. What are we going to do? Nationalize large companies. How about that? No, that’s probably not a strategy. We’ve been using this term self-sovereign identity. What is that, and how did it affect the lives of citizens?

If you have an hour, watch the webinar. If not, then please do read the edited transcript, which we published and released to the public today.

.Thank you for reading my thoughts, please stay safe and enjoy your week.

Best regards,

Don