Industry Players Archives - Identity Woman

Identity issues: Identity.Foundation vs. Decentralized.id

February 17, 2018 By Kaliya Young

So the the Decentralized Identity Foundation has an “identity challenge” with a project pretending to be it – with a very similar domain name and trying to do a token sale. I have a theory that almost all legitimate projects with real people and real work going on behind them also have fake projects shadowing them. Anyways.

Here is the REAL Decentralized Identity Foundation Website: http://identity.foundation. Its got working groups and code and a blog on medium. Its got a whole bunch of real people and projects behind it.

They are working on supporting the emergence of an open standard called DID.

Microsoft just made an announcement about their support and product integration of these emerging open standards.

So the FAKE site is Decentralized.id

It looks really polished and the first page says

YOUR ID: DECENTRALIZED

The DID Foundation, Decentraling your ID over the Blockchain. Sounds good right. Protecting Your ID, Providing Trust, Crypto-Positive. It says one should Join The Foundation – if you do you get DID Tokens!

Then creating a supply 20,000,000,000 of them. They are selling them for .ooo1 USD. They accept BTC, ETH and BCH.

So I checked out their real “address” is at a hot desking space in London.

Decentralized ID is owned by Mr. Sheikh Abdullah Naveed. HE also has a hardware consultancy Torquesol UK Ltd. He has some other companies too – Tapfer Technologies Ltd and Fry-Wi Ltd

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This whole situation highlights the need to have identity verification for organizations too. The good thing is that this is something that the British Columbia Government is working on with a project called Verifiable Organizations Network

Deconstructing Blockchain and Identity Projects: Velix.ID

February 17, 2018 By Kaliya Young

This is going to be the first in what will end up being a long and ongoing series of posts that deconstruct various “blockchain and identity” projects. I was inspired to get started after getting a min into the video explaining this identity system and at least thinking ‘screaming’ in my head NO! NO! NO! that is a horrible horrible design you can’t do that with people and their ID information in the block chain. So then the next question is WHY and that is why I’m going to start writing about specific systems and really going into the details. There is just some things that you CAN NOT DO with people’s identity information.

So here we go… Velix.ID Video:

We share our identity information everywhere – check

Examples include, ordering pizza, getting laundry done, shopping online OR filling in KYC forms – ok check but really are this all equivalent?

Accessing these many services scatters our ID everywhere – Yup when we do businesses with companies they have information about us.

We loose control of how our information is shared and used – Yep it is in their databases and could end up being sold or traded two third parties (other businesses we don’t transact with)

We loose time with all that form filling. – Ok. Time that could be better used playing video games – ahh ok but some people actually take care of people and have physical hobbies who wrote this script and who are you appealing to when that is the thing you think people are needing more time for?

With Velix you can access these services instantly while you retain control fo your data and your privacy – Ok and how do you do this for realz?

So how does Velix work – do tell?

A user can create a profile and update all their information on it – ahh ok – where is the profile?

All of the data will be associated with an 8 digital alphanumeric ID – WAIT STOP – all my information is associated with one 8 digit number? So if I share my number with one business and then go to a different business and share my 8 digit number with them – the businesses can use this information to know that I patronize both of them? My information can be correlated together. This is not a good design choice and is not privacy protecting.

And this data is stored on the user’s own device, never with Velix. – ah ok and what if I loose my device?

This Velix ID can be shared by the user to access any member services with any business instantly and securely – Wait, how?

If any business has already verified information of a Velix ID user other businesses don’t have to repeat it. The new business on the Velix.ID can simply request the verified identity from the business organization that has already verified it through Velix.ID blockchain – So this raises lots of alarms, getting verified ID information from one business that I do business with requires I reveal who I do business with and has verified things about me and for them to go to the trouble to releasing the information.

To facilitate these transactions and identities Velix.ID has developed its own native utility token called VLX. During the transaction the business requesting the identity pays VLX and a tiny bite is taken by Velix.ID and a tiny bite is offered to the user for their generous act of giving consent for the transaction to occur and the rest goes to the verified identity provider. – mmm ok but we still have all these challenges of linking and connecting things together.

This process saves time and money both for consumers and businesses. And keeps the users identity information secure and private – i’m not really clear how. Individual’s identity information is still shared with businesses I do business with.

The next time you face boring and unsafe personal identity verification use your Velix.ID instead. A frictionless experience of identity sharing – mmm…only if the relying party is in this system and accepts these types of identity.

Reading the White Paper on their website

A few lines stood out and raise red flags.

In the Abstract: The primary reason why a disruption in the identity-verification (IDV) space has not het happened is the lack of a tested/proven trust-framework on which all institutions, globally can rely on for sharing costs and liability of identity verification. Velix.ID aims at bridging this gap by building a universal, obscure, transparent, decentralized, time efficient, and cost-efficient ecosystem for identity verification.

So there won’t be ONE global framework for everyone to get all their identity verified. Just won’t the world is to big and there are to many different types of identities, types of transactions and needs of people.

All identity holders on the Velix.ID ecosystem possess a unique identity number to which all fo their data will be associated!!! red flags all over the place all my stuff about me associate with one number this IS the issue we have now. That identity numbers that are universal and point at me. They create massive correlation issues – you guys need to read the Laws of Identity and understand one of those key concepts – the Law of Directed Identifiers.

Level 2 Advanced PII – the platform will be capable to store nonstandard and industry specific data for an Identity on the Blockchain – WAIT HOW? NO PII should ever be store anywhere on a block chain.

In the Appendix: They want to issue Velix.ID cards to people, with their 8 digit number. They say this will let you check-in to airports and hotels – but ONLY if these institutions accept the Velix.ID as an identity provider.

How can this be a universal ID system if there aren’t even a Billion Numbers in the 8 digit name space. Is that the main giveaway that this is just a total scam?

So there is also plan to have an NFC reader that would would be able to manage access control to physical spaces. – Ok…but really? Cause this problem is mostly solved for employees and students.

Facebook's Problem = FSW Opportunity

November 14, 2012 By Kaliya Young 1 Comment

ReadWriteWeb’s social Blog has an articule up referencing a conversation the author had with Mark Cuban about Facebook’s business model and integrity challenges.

Apparently Facebook is now going to charge brands a huge amount to reach the base of fans they have accumulated on facebook.

I’ve heard anecdotally about a huge brand that was complaining recently because it has spent four years building a following of millions of people, promoting its Facebook presence (and, by implication, Facebook itself) on expensive television ads – and now Facebook has flipped a switch and, overnight, their reach dropped by 40%.

So now they’re done. They’ve been burned, and, like Cuban, they’re looking elsewhere.

A few weeks back I as in a tweeted to a woman complaining how Facebook was shaping which of her friend’s updates she saw and even asking her to pay money to have her updates go to more of her friends. I said that when we had a federated social web she wouldn’t have this problem we would choose which of our friends we would follow and get updates from.

I attended my 3rd out of three federated social web summits ~~last week~~ eek it feels like last week it was 2 weeks ago just after IIW 15. Evan Prodromo pulled together an amazing group of folks working on key aspects of the challenge.

Phil Wolff and I presented about the emerging Personal Cloud offerings coming out of our community of companies (the Personal Data Ecosystem Startup Circle)

Tantek shared POSSE – Publish On your Own Site Syndicate Everywhere.

Even gave an update on where OStatus the stack of protocols that gives you twitter and facebook like functionality across services.

We learned about many other projects. too (you can see them on the wiki here).

I’m glad that folks like Mark Cuban are waking up to the fact there is an issue with Facebook and they should be looking elsewere. Facebook is to social what AOL and Compuserve were to e-mail. It will be disrupted by the Open Standards based infrastructure must of it based on Open Source code. People will have their own personal node on the network – a personal cloud where they will connect to others and to organizations they want to share with, connect with and do business with.

It would be great to see some big investments in core open infrastructure that can then be leveraged to make money afterwards. This is what Doc Searls is always saying you make money because of it not with it. We need the web to continue extending to being the type that Nobody Owns, Everyone can Use it and Anyone improve it. Open Standards are the key to this. I argue they are more important then open source code alone (look at diaspora open source but rolled its own way of doing things…and didn’t interoperate with other projects/efforts doing similar things)

If you were to ask me what would get us to the future fastest though it is open source implementations of those open standards are invaluable and what “investors” like Mark Cuban and others who are now seeing the danger of one company “owning” the social profiles and identities of a billion people should consider funding now with no strings attached.

I was asked by an investor group that I gave a day long briefing to about the the emerging Personal Data Ecosystem. I said I would give Evan Prodromo 12 million dollars no strings attached (as in you are not seeking a return on the money with more money) the deliverable for that money would be a working federated social web in 1 year. On that web one can build a huge variety of businesses and services in new ways not possible on today’s web (or at least not possible without creepy stalking and trackers and paying middle men like facebook to talk to your “fans”). That web itself…shouldn’t be “owned” it needs to be created though.

The new Google is Creepier then ever.

January 25, 2012 By Kaliya Young Leave a Comment

The Washington Post has an article today that talks about what google is doing as of today:

Google’s no-opt-out privacy changes and the end of the anonymous Internet

Google announced Tuesday its plans to integrate data from all its services with your profile for logged-in Google+ users.

She makes this assertion in the early part of the article.

The Internet, nowadays, is overwhelmingly dominated by fora in which you hang out as your actual self. Facebook. Twitter. And now, Google.

While I understand her assertion that the net is “dominated” by these fora. There are two assumptions one is that the people in those places are being ‘Their actual selves” when the research shows that people are being thoughtful and careful about how they present in different places and what aspects of themselves they share where (see danah boyd’s research about young people and networked publics). I think in one way she is right the people like her – who went to college and have mainstream white collar jobs are on these fora with their real names but most people who actually do interesting hobbies or have religious lives that they don’t share publically or across all contexts of their lives either are not sharing about these on those fora or they are keeping them contextually separate using different names and handles.

This weekend at She’s Geeky I am going to ask a lot of questions of the women coming about how they do manage their identities and what they want and need out of digital systems to feel safe using them.

Tie actions online to our real identities, and suddenly online activity has real-world consequences.

This is very true and unless we build tools that give people both persona management and context management we are going to be creating a really creepy world. See my TEDx Talk on Participatory Totalitarianism.