Two weeks ago the K(no)w Identity announced that Edward Snowden is going to be the keynote speaker.
It will be interesting to hear what his take is on the state of the industry. I wonder if he actually doing to do research to understand the current dynamics.
Looking out broadly into the industry landscape. I see a lot of corporations and a lot of state actors lining up to “give people identities” when they already have them. Everyone has an identity (in fact more then one if they operate in many contexts). The companies who issue identity cards, or in the passport business, or voter registration systems writing really shiny reports with the World Bank and other agencies like that.
What people often don’t have is a formal link to formal government and corporate systems and haven’t been assigned identifiers ye. Then these identifiers are what can be used by other corporate and government systems to point at them some more when they interact with them. This isn’t a bad thing but it isn’t good thing either. It isn’t good when people are not empowered with their own identities and at the effect of these systems. When they are designed to inherently track and surveil and connect together dots about people without their awareness or consent.
I am enthusiastic about the current work around distributed identities and self-sovereign identities but these too have big challenges. Usability, comprehensibility, acceptance by relying parties (like you can use it somewhere)…. not like we have any of these things for digital versions of state issued identifiers either but at least you can walk into bank and hand a physical ID to a banker and get a bank account.
It will be the 2nd conference I have spoken at where he is the keynote speaker. The first one as HOPEX in 2014. Where he did a conversation with Daniel Elseberg.
Archives for April 2017
They are ATTRIBUTES IBM – attributes!~!~!
So.. I’m watching this fine video by IBM about its “self-sovereign” identity document solution that magically the drivers licence authority can “erase” with a click of the button from them (yes the could if need to be able to revoke your privilege to drive but its an ID you use for many other things besides that). See that in this video.
The next video just got me hopping – they are calling all the bits of information about you on the drivers licence “traits” rather than the industry norm for those types of things “attributes”. Anyways maybe this is for public consumption. Link to video. And for a bouns…”my traits don’t makeup who I am”. (Oh but the ISO standards they are following often take this perspective).
I think this first video listed may be the first case I have seen of the white-washing of the term self-sovereign Identity.
Perhaps it was and is naive to believe that we will be able to build systems that really empower consumers and take advantage of the things that bits can do that paper documents can’t. The grooves of thinking about how things will need to be are shaped by the people and institutions that have been thinking about this and driving this since the era when they created passports that were a new and novel thing in the 1920s. they are driven by the institutions that seek to control us via our identities.
They don’t have a problem using the term “cryptoblob” – which might be a good term of art.
Dave Barns is working on this a lot and it is very interesting that he and his group have not found IIW yet. It just shows that the landscape is ripe for more connecting. Hopefully they can join us in May or October.