Online Identities and Trust

Aug 01 2018
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On March 21st 2018, the Engineroom project ran an expert workshop in London to support the establishment of a research agenda for the Next Generation Internet. One of the activities was to examine challenges for a set of umbrella topics. "Online Identities and Trust" was one of those topics and four distinct areas of discussion were elicited:

  • General thoughts;
  • Challenges;
  • Opportunities;
  • Examples.

Online Identities and Trust

Described as: There is a need for secure online identity verification and management system that can replace the trustless system with trust-enhancing solutions which would be alternatives to codifying trust through reputation systems.

General thoughts

  • Instead of various identities for each individual issued by various governments, federated identities will enhance trust, security and reputation.
  • New identity formations are in place which contain characteristics from governments, business world and individuals e.g. World Identity Network, ID2020, YouPort etc.
  • E-Estonia is a great example and an important source of inspiration that makes Estonia as the world’s most sophisticated digital government/economy.

Challenges

  • Instead of choosing good and favourable processes, we used to select what is more convenient. Complexity of convenience is a big challenge against change.
  • Decentralised identity systems need some sort of verifiability or legitimacy from a wider community.
  • Europe needs to look for an alternative, realistic, and optimistic vision which should revolve around immutable, and trustworthy identity systems.

Opportunities

  • Europe needs to benefit from the world’s most sophisticated identity and e-government system (e-Estonia) of Estonia and scale it on a European level.
  • Europe-wide identity management system makes a more frictionless single market and would solve a lot of economic issues.

Examples

  • Alice is a platform that brings transparency to social funding through blockchain technology.
  • Yoti is a London-based technology company on a mission to become the world’s trusted identity platform.

 


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