Developing Economies

In the developed world the solution to having our identities owned and monetized by third parties is to introduce self-sovereign identity . This is a concept where the individual has ultimate control over their identity and is the final arbiter of who can access and use their data and personal information. This is a new concept in that previous thought around digital identity has always hinged on "identity providers", which are the entities that own and control our identity. Some discussions on "decentralized identity" have defined "decentralized" as having the option of choosing your identity provider. Self-sovereign identity goes further by having the individual be in control.



Note, with self-sovereign identity the individual still has the option of letting a trusted identity provider manage their identity, so we get the best of both worlds.



What makes self-sovereign identity possible today is the convergence of several technologies: Blockchain technology like Ethereum allows for shared, trusted computation that can fulfill the role played by identity providers today. Distributed data storage systems like Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) have the ability to store data in a more efficient way than a blockchain but still benefit from the security of the blockchain. Finally, modern encryption technologies allow for combining privacy with the public nature of the blockchain.





Developed Economies

In the developing world, digital self-sovereign identity can be a big help to refugees and other disenfranchised people. Digital identities registered and controlled through a blockchain require no central company or organization to maintain, and can survive political and social turmoil so that refugees can retain access to their digital identities even under such difficult conditions.



Furthermore, by using bleeding-edge technologies like Enigma & Hawk it would even be possible to maintain a biometrics database that can be linked to the identities in privacy-preserving ways. Even without these future technologies policy architectures like those introduced by Vinay Gupta can provide a policy separation between biometrics databases and digital identifiers to implement privacy protection for biometrics.



