Privacy Within Your Control

What if we could put control of your identity and the protection of your privacy in your hands? The good news is I will present a solution an international community of developers has been working on that we can all get behind to protect our identity and preserve our privacy while also sharing data that may help public health.

Since the middle of 2020, I have been working on three projects that are focused on moving the internet towards adopting what we in the identity verification and privacy industry call “Self-Sovereign Identity,” or SSI. The broadest of these projects is promoted by the Trust Over IP (ToIP), the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), and the W3C . ToIP and DIF have built communities of developers, policy wonks, identity experts, and ethics philosophers to the design of protocol standards for the whole of the internet to resolve the issue of protecting your identity while you are surfing the web, playing an online game, or streaming a YouTube video.

Because the Linux Foundation does not control the internet, nor even the W3C, no one really does; it will be our decision as individuals and organizations that use the internet every day to adopt products that are using these standards. If we do, this will bring to us all the options to prove we are real humans, whom we are as a person, while hiding our identities as we surf and buy from the digital world.

The second project combines the two issues we’ve been discussing: your personal identity, privacy, and proving your status of COVID-19. We have been taking the governance of the ToIP protocol and applying it to the creation of the Good Health Pass. The Good Health Pass is a collaboration of many international organizations that wish to enable individuals to comply with required COVID-19 status demands in a format that is acceptable to the requestor (government or business) while also protecting the identity and privacy of the holder (you) of the credential. We have published these open standards free to anyone to adopt. Most of this is now within the Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) under the leadership of

This leads to the third project I have been working on, which is developing a digital wallet that you can use to protect your identity and hold not only the Good Health Pass credentials but any type of credential that is verified and built using the same standards including your state ID or passport. The company we have incorporated to bring this wallet to you is called Thrivacy . Thrivacy is leveraging blockchain technology, cryptography, and artificial intelligence to empower people across the globe to take back control of their own personal information using what are called verifiable credentials from issuing authorities.

This way you can control your identity and personal credentials with immutable (meaning unchangeable) proofs so others can trust the information you are providing them without some “trustworthy third party.” Thrivacy is a cybersecurity and data privacy company focused on helping individuals move their identity from the paper ID world to today’s advanced digital world safely and securely.

Paper IDs like your state driver’s license and your international passport are still the most convenient to use in most cases, but they are not secure, and they don’t allow you to determine how much of your personal data, like your full name, home address or birthdate, you would like to keep private. The McKinsey Global Institute illustrates the need for Thrivacy and ToIP, where half of the world’s online population have no secure digital identity, and one billion people lack a legal ID of any kind. The other 3.4 billion have their personal information spread worldwide in banks, government databases, Walmart systems, the GAAFTM, and now the hacker world’s dark web.

Even in my home state of South Carolina, USA, nearly a quarter of our population is under or unbanked because they cannot prove their identity to the level of which the banks must approve them through their required “Know Your Customer” identity verification processes. With companies, countries, and employers around the world taking the required COVID-19 status to other requirements, we started working through the various Decentralized Identity Foundations and other decentralized identity communities to adopt the standards of SSI, where we cryptographically protect your personal information in a decentralized private storage system on your phone that you can (ultimately) use anywhere.

If this ideal to de-identify yourself interests you, especially in your journey to createyourself, please reach out to me.

When you want to speak with me about your ideas or needs, reach out via?LinkedIn?or through our mobile community app,?GordonJones.org

Have a great weekend, Gordon

PS - Feel free to buy our Kindle version of?How to Createyourself

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