Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves
I spoke with James Felton Keith, author and podcast host of Inclusionism, about my book, Domains of Identity. How do we manage our digital identity? What are the 13 domains of identity?
Listen to Podcast: Inclusionism with Kaliya Young, author of Domains of Identity.
I almost went to Brazil this year for the Radical Exchange conference. Instead it went virtual with 48 hours of programming. I had the pleasure of talking with Paula Berman (Democracy Earth) and Supriyo Roy (Idena). Each of us shared about different future looking identity projects/efforts we are involved in.
I co-authored this paper with Glen Weyl and Lucas Geiger.
Intersectional Social Data
In our previous three-part series, we motivated the case for decentralized identity systems, and exposed some of the current frameworks for implementing digital identity systems. In this piece we expose some of our collective research in Decentralized Identifiers (DID) and identity for emergent social structures. Finally we suggest further avenues of investigation and outcomes of the public goods of the internet post decentralized identity.
In September of 2019 I was invited to present to the world’s bankers at the conference run by the co-op at the center of the world’s banking system, SWIFT. The stage is fantastic 24m x 4m high. You can see SSI outlined in large details. I also cover big topics like the meaning of the word trust. Enjoy!
Acclaimed expert Kaliya Young, widely known as ‘Identity Woman’, explores the concept of self-sovereign identity (SSI) on the Innotribe stage.
I traveled to India in the Winter of 2019 to study their National ID System Aadhaar. This is the paper that I wrote:
Key Differences Between the U.S. Social Security System and India’s Aadhaar System (Kaliya Young)
In the summer of 2018 I was invited to give a keynote address at MyData Global. I took the opportunity to share the Domains of Identity (now a book) and weave them together with how Self-Sovereign Identity works and conclude highlighting the need for collaboration going forward.
I got to speak with Kent Bye on his voices of VR Podcast. We were together at the DWeb Summit and that set the context for our conversation. I hadn’t listened to this interview ever until today – it is fun. I laugh a lot. Enjoy.
Kaliya Young (aka Identity Woman) has been working on digital identities for the past 15 years including helping facilitate the twice-a-year Internet Identity Workshop. These workshops lead to the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops and the Decentralized Identity Foundation, which created a W3C specification on Decentralized Identifiers.
I had a chance to catch up with Young at the Decentralized Web Summit where we talk about the Decentralized Identifiers standards and the history of self-sovereign identity.
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
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.
Peter Theil has been getting a bunch of flack for his support of Donald Trump. I was kind of thought of myself in the group that was giving him flack. (although I didn’t say anything myself I think I Retweeted a few things by people in the flack department).
LISTENING to Theil defend his support of Trump actually was illuminating.
He is supporting Trump for the big things he gets right. “Free Trade” isn’t working out so well for middle America. “Not everyone benefits and the Trump voters know it” – ok super reasonable things to say. Also super strange for “Mr. libertarian” to be talking about.
Being at war for 16 years. 2million people lost lives and over 5000 American soldiers are dead 50 billion dollars bring democracy to Iraq and squandered 40x as much to bring about chaos. – also super reasonable and speaking truth.
Here is the excerpt that I listened to on Bloomberg Technology.
I was invited to give a talk at Privacy Identity and Innovation about the Digital Death and the conference that has happened a few times Digital Death Day.
I chose to lay out a matrix of questions that have arisen from the work. Enjoy the talk.
Digital Death a Matrix of Questions and Considerations from Privacy Identity Innovation on Vimeo.
So the Guardian is reporting about Sean Parkers remarks at the Techonomy conference.
Thinking ahead.
None of us could possibly have understood what it would mean to have a billion or two billion people potentially using these platforms regularly,” said Parker. “That wasn’t something that factored into anyone’s analysis in the starting of these companies. You just want to be a successful company. You want to understand the mechanisms that work, you want to play into them, you want to reinforce them, you want to be a successful company.”
While it is refreshing to hear some self reflection after the fact about the consequences of building a social platform driven by profit with an incentive to get people to engage with it – personal and social costs be-dammed.
I think people did for-see and could understand some of the negative effects he is discussing – the problem is they just were not in the mix of young men founding these companies at the time. The fact is the narrow demographic of who was empowered with funds to create these systems (By men likc Sean Parker and Peter Theil) and who thcy subsequently chose to hire and listen to early on (Read the Boy Kings to get the inside scoop on that) speaks volumes about what was built.
As a side note I developed an outline for building a distributed social network for spiritual activist leaders and their followers in 2003-4. I even raised $35,000 and had two protoypes build in Drupal. I like to think if I got funding beyond that and had the chance to develop the vision we were thinking about the social consequences.
Communities considering the future of social tools and online communities did think thoughtfully about the future and how things could play out and what was needed to support things evolving well from a user-centric perspective. A great starting point published in 2003 is the Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet.
My friend Allen who was at Brookings got a job with NTIA to figure out what issues to focus on and how to get multi-stakeholder collaboration on cyber security issues. Because he asked me to respond I took the time to give him my thoughts and input drawing on my experience with the attempts by NSTIC to do this same thing. Here is the PDF document. IPTF-Kaliya-2
I will in time work to publish it in blog sized sections online so it is more internally linkable (starting with an index from this post). Until then enjoy.
Short answer No – I’m headed to the protest today at Facebook.
A post about the experience will be up here by tomorrow. I’ll be tweeting from my account there which is of course @identitywoman
______
Post from Sept 2014
Mid-July, friend called me up out of the blue and said “we won!”
“We won what” I asked.
“Google just officially changed its policy on Real Names”
He said I had to write a post about it. I agreed but also felt disheartened.
We won but we didn’t it took 3 years before they changed.
They also created a climate online where it was OK and legitimate for service providers to insist on real names.
For those of you not tracking the story – I along with many thousands of people had our Google+ accounts suspended – this posts is an annotated version of all of those.
This was the Google Announcement:
[Read more…] about We "won" the NymWars? did we?
I first met Dan Whaley last spring via an introduction from Jim Fournier co-founder of Planetwork. I was inspired by the vision he was working on building Hypothes.is – a way to have sentence level annotation of news and other articles on a web wide scale. Really a foundation for peer review on the web. The motivation for his work is to support greater discernment of the truth around climate change and other key issues facing our society and our planet. (Another area I could see this being really useful right now is around accountability in the financial system and ways to make that real.)
He asked me to be a part of the project as an advisor particularly around identity issues and technology options for identity. He is taking my advice and coming to IIW this coming week. Its an honor to be amongst other distinguished advisors like Brewster Kahle, John Perry Barlow, Mark Surman and others..
He has been working on a development plan and has a solid on one in place. He has launched a Kickstarter Campaign and stars in the video that articulates the vision of the project. If you are inspired by the vision I encourage you to contribute.
Following my post yesterday Google+ says your name is “Toby” not “Kunta Kinte”, I chronicled tweets from this morning’s back and forth with Tim O’Reilly and Kevin Marks, Nishant Kaushik, Phil Hunt, Steve Bogart and Suw Charman-Anderson.
I wrote the original post after watching the Bradley Horwitz (@elatable) – Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) interview re: Google+. I found Tim’s choice of words about the tone (strident) and judgement (self-righteous) towards those standing up for their freedom to choose their own names on the new social network being rolled out by Google internet’s predominant search engine disappointing. His response to my post was to call me self-righteous and reiterate that this was just a market issue.
I myself have been the victim of a Google+ suspension since July 31st and yesterday I applied for a mononym profile (which is what it was before they insisted I fill out my last name which I chose to do so with my online handle and real life identity “Identity Woman”)
In the thread this morning Tim said that the kind of pressure being aimed at Google is way worse then anything they are doing and that in fact Google was the subject of a “lynch mob” by these same people. Sigh, I guess Tim hasn’t read much history but I have included some quotes form and links to wikipedia for additional historial context.
Update: inspired in part by this post an amazing post “about tone” as a silencing/ignoring tactics when difficult, uncomfortable challenges are raised in situations of privilege was written by Shiela Marie.
I think there is a need for greater understanding all around and that perhaps blogging and tweeting isn’t really the best way to address it. I know that in the identity community when we first formed once we started meeting one another in person and really having deep dialogues in analogue form that deeper understanding emerged. IIW the place we have been gathering for 6 years and talking about the identity issues of the internet and other digital systems is coming up in mid-October and all are welcome. The agenda is created live the day of the event and all topics are welcome.
Here’s the thread… (oldest tweets first)
Note all the images of tweets in this thread are linked to the actual tweet (unless they erased the tweet). [Read more…] about Is Google+ is being lynched by out-spoken users upset by real names policy?
This post is about what is going on at a deeper level when Google+ says your name is “Toby” NOT “Kunta Kinte”. The punchline video is at the bottom feel free to scroll there and watch if you don’t want to read to much.
This whole line of thought to explain to those who don’t get what is going on with Google+ names policy arose yesterday after I watched the Bradley Horwitz – Tim O’Reilly interview (they start talking about the real names issue at about minute 24).
[Read more…] about Google+ says your name is "Toby" NOT "Kunta Kinte"
Seeing that Google+ is approving mononyms for some (Original Sai, on the construction of names Additional Post) but not for others (Original Stilgherrian Post Update post ).
I decided to go in and change my profile basically back to what it was before all this started. I put a ( . ) dot in the last name field. In my original version of my google proflile my last name was a * and when they said that was not acceptable I put my last name as my online handle “Identity Woman”.
[Read more…] about Lets try going with the Mononym for Google+
When Google+ launched, I went with my handle as my last name. This makes a ton of sense to me. If you asked most people what my last name is, they wouldn’t know. It isn’t “common” for me. Many people don’t even seem to know my first name. I can’t tell you how many times I have found myself talking with folks at conferences this past year and seeing ZERO lighbulbs going off when I say my name “Kaliya”, but when I say I have the handle or blog “Identity Woman” they are like “Oh wow! You’re Identity Woman… cool!” with a tone of recognition – because they know my work by that name.
One theory I have about why this works is because it is not obvious how you pronounce my name when you read it. And conversely, it isn’t obvious how you write my name when you hear it. So the handle that is a bit longer but everyone can say spell “Identity Woman” really serves me well professionally. It isn’t like some “easy to say and spell” google guy name like Chris Messina or Joseph Smarr or Eric Sachs or Andrew Nash. I don’t have the privilege of a name like that so I have this way around it.
So today…I get this
I have “violated” community standards when using a name I choose to express my identity – an identity that is known by almost all who meet me. I, until last October, had a business card for 5 years that just had Identity Woman across the top.
Display Name – To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of these would be acceptable. Learn more about your name and Google Profiles.
[Read more…] about Google+ and my "real" name: Yes, I'm Identity Woman
There are many definitions of trust, and all people have their own internal perspective on what THEY trust.
As I outline in this next section, there is a lot of meaning packed into the word “trust” and it varies on context and scale. Given that the word trust is found 97 times in the NSTIC document and that the NSTIC governing body is going to be in charge of administering “trust marks” to “trust frameworks” it is important to review its meaning.
I can get behind this statement: There is an emergent property called trust, and if NSTIC is successful, trust on the web would go up, worldwide.
However, the way the word “trust” is used within the NSTIC document, it often includes far to broad a swath of meaning.
When spoken of in every day conversation trust is most often social trust.
[Read more…] about The Trouble with Trust, & the case for Accountability Frameworks for NSTIC
The NSTIC governance NOI articulates many key activities, qualities and goals for a governance system for NSTIC. NSTIC must:
Achieving these goals will require high-performance collaboration amongst the steering group and all self-identified stakeholder groups. It will also require earning the legitimacy from the public at large and using methods that surface their experience of the Identity Ecosystem Framework as it evolves.
[Read more…] about Alignment of Stakeholders around the many NSTIC Goals