>>23416851
THE BLAIR INSTITUTE
A New Approach to Digital Identity
Commentary
29th March 2018 CY
By multiple experts (2)
https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/new-approach-digital-identity
-
Revolutions sometimes come in small steps. For those of us born before 1995, turning 16 had a small coming of age moment: a blue and red card would arrive in the post. Squished in bulging wallets, between various receipts, loyalty, debit and credit cards, our National Insurance card would later invariably be lost, or buried in a drawer. A minor panic would then ensue each time a new employer asked for your number.
But today, as wallets have shrunk and new payment forms such as Apple Pay arisen, a major transformation can take place, giving people greater control of the identity and information and nations a greater control of their borders. Through our own digital ID โ a self-sovereign identity โ wide reforms can also be put in place to reboot government and citizenship for the 21st Century.
The introduction of ID cards in the UK has long been a politically fraught issue. But such cards are common across Europe and, in digitally pioneering countries like Estonia, encrypted IDs allow people to authenticate themselves online, so that they can vote, submit tax claims, or manage medical prescriptions without leaving the house. Citizenship is intertwined with the nation state and we need to be smarter in how we manage this.
Two challenges need to be overcome.
The first is finding an acceptable balance between the stateโs desire to have an authoritative view of what is happening, and the right of individuals to go about their lives without undue monitoring. Any approach that involves building a national identity database runs two big risks: that it is used by the state either now or in the future to profile the activities and behaviour of individual citizens, and that it is compromised on an industrial scale by hackers with malicious or criminal intent.[1]Link to footnote
The second is more prosaic. Despite advances in production methods, it remains possible to create counterfeit physical identity documents that will pass a cursory examination. And because the data printed on the documents is in plain sight, people often share far more information than warranted. In the UK these challenges apply to the documents we use for identification, such as passports, birth certificates and driving licences. All of these are routinely requested, copied or transcribed in ways that take our data well outside of our control.
Fortunately, new technologies can help address these. By putting individuals in control of their personal data and securing it with digital signatures, individuals can credibly assert their identity or status without mediation by the state. And because digital data is more flexible than physical documents, it would be possible to share only the information required in any given circumstance.
Such an approach, broadly characterised as self-sovereign identity, could work as follows:
Continued