To maintain our freedom, we must own our identity

Special Note: This article does not reflect the views of anyone else or any organisation I am affiliated with and are my own views on the subject.

Our identities and our freedom have been intertwined since the dawn of time. Just think of how names and titles indicate a person’s lineage, their way of saying “this is who I am and I belong here”.?Being able to prove that you were a Roman citizen could save you from harsh punishment or even death. And being able to prove who you are today can still very important, even for basic safety. Identity can of course be used against us too, as whole groups of people have discovered in our recent history, but that is another reason why this discussion is so important. Through generations identity has been used to convey trust and enable us to interact with society as free agents (or as free as one can be in a particular society). Without the ability to say “this is who I am” people were and are much more likely to be at the mercy of others. Does any of this really apply to you though, living in a modern Western democratic country? Absolutely. And it is rapidly becoming more relevant.

Our governments have identity processes that support democracy like ‘birth, death and marriage’ registers, social identifiers, and census which are critical to our current way of life. However, these processes can have flaws and their trustworthiness has been called into question many times. They have also long been targets for exploitation. The processes and systems underlying these are struggling to keep up with modern citizen expectations – that is, how can we engage with the democratic process using the same digital channels we use to engage with the rest of our work and personal lives?

It is not just the formal political process that relies on our identity though: so many of our core business functions – particularly lending – rest on this foundational pillar. Our interactions with many of our favourite stores (particularly online), along with the burgeoning array of subscriptions we rely on, are all dependent. Our names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, employment – all of these and more become critical bits of information in our modern lives. Of course, this is all much to the delight of new-age paper hangers and fraudsters, but that is not what this article is about.

“…our current approach to identity has eroded our ability to exercise freedom…”

Central to this discussion is that our current approach to identity has eroded our ability to exercise freedom and continues to further erode it. One of the most important reasons for this development is that information and misinformation can be shared by anyone, whether that person is real or not, and usually without repercussions to the sharer and publisher, who are most probably immune to the consequences and downstream affects that information has. Our current predicament is in large part because information is not tied to a person, the validity of that person has not been tested, and usually the validity of the information is not tested either. It was only very recently in our history when information came from an ‘official’ channel and the source of the information could be easily ascertained, whether that information was correct or not. Note that official channels can of course be a source of horrifying information or directives too – Ugandan radio was a major cause of the ensuing massacre, but the source was known nonetheless.

The lack of a clear relationship between information and a person or source [identity] overheats an environment where many people feel like their voices are not heard or if expressed are squashed under a cacophony of bipartisan criticism, which is often amplified by a relatively small number of people or pseudo people. Importantly, the very systems that enable us to interact with the world are simultaneously shunning us because all the noise in our digital world is largely divorced from true identity and the natural censure that true identity entails. The alternate extreme of this, although far from perfect as gossip still abounds, is a village where everyone knows everyone, and your personal reputation is critical to your wellbeing. If your neighbour accuses you of stealing and you deny it, but the butcher and the baker have both seen you stealing their wares then you’re probably poked. Two-way rating systems of today are better, though still imperfect examples of this in our digital world, as used by companies like Uber and Airbnb. Both the buyer and seller can create ratings and the combined ratings of multiple people are what creates your ‘reputation’ – that is, one bad actor should not be able to throw a buyer or a seller into disrepute. However, these platforms are also one of the best examples of how our current identity system can fail us, that is, it is far too easy to create another persona on these platforms and in so doing ‘wipe your slate’.?Of course, that will not help you build up good reviews, but does allow you to escape the bad ones. Two-way rating systems usually fail the ‘village test’ for another reason – both the buyer and seller are incentivised to give mainly good reviews, despite what flaws or issues may have actually occurred. If I rent a house and it is terrible and I give a bad review that might affect my ability to rent another house when competing against a renter that only gives good reviews. This is a very tough nut to crack, but more resilient identities will help because all actor’s true characters should be better represented over time. This is because a lot less people can game the system, therefore levelling the playing field for everyone. In the village example we are mostly responsible for what makes up our identity and we retain control of it; whereas in our current reality we no longer control our identities, the barons of the digital world have ultimate control.

“…in our current reality we no longer control our identities, the barons of the digital world have ultimate control.”

Identifying ourselves or our digital personas is second nature to most of us and is barely noticed as we go about our lives. Sadly, when we look more closely at these interactions we find they are generally weighted in favour of the government, the business, or the organisation that we are dealing with – essentially those in power. It should come as no surprise that typically those entities that create the mechanism, hold the power. We must remember that we are talking about ourselves – it is our identity, our person, our information, our friends, our family, our beliefs, our opinions that are being used for the advantage of an entity we may not have any loyalty or alliance to – along with whatever ‘partners’ they choose to share it with. Part of the reason we find ourselves in this situation is that until very recently the digital world was seen as very separate from our ‘real’ lives, but for most people with access to a high-speed connection and a smart phone, this is no longer true. Our ability to interact with society is predicated on a blending of the physical and digital worlds and this trend is accelerating every day. One only has to look at the personal carnage that is created when someone falls victim to a well-orchestrated identity theft to know this is true. We cannot bank, we cannot buy, we cannot communicate with our friends and family; even the legitimacy of the things we own (including property) can be called into question. The danger of the current situation might seem distant or limited, which is why this article opened with history. History tells us that the danger is very real, and so do things happening right now, particularly recent tampering with elections, the defamation of characters online, and governments operating beyond their mandates. These things are happening in our ‘free’ nations, but the misuse of identity in the context of both our physical and digital worlds has a fundamental impact on millions of people in places that do not practice any defensible level of democracy. Think about the use of surveillance (online and offline), behaviour tracking, and censure; and the very real downstream effects this has on everyday lives and behaviour. A rethink on how we create and manage our identities, and who does this, while important for me and you, could be a matter of life and death for some people.

A fundamental shift is required to change the current situation. System changes support a change in expectations and culture. A system change can help keep our digital world as one of opportunity and possibility where oppression, both overt and covert, is driven out. Freedom relies on many things, but one of them is that we, as citizens of earth, control our own identities, both physically and digitally.

Our future freedom depends on citizens owning their primary identity and exercising control over it as they use it to interact with their world. As the digital bleeds further into the physical this need becomes ever more urgent. Arguably one of the reasons the announcement of Facebook’s name change to Meta received so much criticism is that people do not trust Zuckerberg and they do not trust Facebook. The thought that even more control of the ‘metaverse’ would rest with this digital giant is therefore scary.

“…freedom depends on citizens owning their primary identity…”

We could spend a lot of time discussing why citizen-owned identity is so important by looking at the negative side of the coin, but what about the positive? Identity has always held so much promise. The age-old tradition of buying land and using that land for the benefit of your family is predicated on proving you are the owner. Incidentally, one of the more despotic behaviours we have seen happen even in very recent times (and throughout history) is governments and other power brokers destroying or subverting land ownership evidence so they can take it for themselves. In this digital age, which is so recent in our history, but so ingrained in our lives, identity holds a new promise – one of balancing power, giving citizens individual voices, and not just in an election, but continually. Control of your true identity would also mean citizens could shape the activity of the digital barons, who in some cases already wield more power than the governments of people who consume those services. Beyond these broad benefits that are foundational to retaining our fundamental freedoms, there are everyday benefits too, which also empower and free us.

Everyday benefits include things like proving (automatically) how much tax we owe or have paid, along with related information like who we support (dependents), and how much we give away (charity). It can remove friction, cost, and inequities in our legal and financial systems. For instance, by giving people the ability to interact with large institutions quickly and easily while retaining control of their information and only releasing it under rules and conditions the individual controls.

One of the most important reasons it is past time for citizen-owned identity is the consistently cavalier way our digital identities and personal information have been handled by so many major organisations, and in some cases governments. Data and privacy breaches have abounded year after year, with nearly all of them being avoidable. Unless we personally hold the keys, these breaches, along with the unauthorised use of our information will continue to have an outsized impact on us, with usually negligible impact on the organisations in question.

You may be asking yourself now, is this even possible? Will governments and corporations get out of our way and let us do this? They will not have a choice. If enough people adopt new systems for identity, then citizen power, particularly in democratic countries, will force a change. We have seen glimmers of hope already, with GDPR legislation in Europe having resulted in behaviour changes and significant fines for misuse of private information by corporations, but it is not enough by itself.

For change to truly happen we need new systems for creating and orchestrating the use of identity – new systems that are not owned and controlled by governments and corporations. These new platforms should absolutely integrate with and leverage the data and systems of governments and corporations, but without dependence on them.

It is time we take a whole new approach to our identities that blends the physical and digital worlds and takes a citizen-centric perspective. It is time for change.