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.
