The Emergence of a Self-Sovereign Identity Web – Info Gadgets

I have written a lot about decentralization, but another way to to think about it is how should human rights take place on the future web. Self–sovereign identity is a concept, where an individual is able to control his/her identity attributes (that is, the pieces of personal data), no matter where they reside in. GDPR outlines some basics of what this might become.

Self-Sovereign Experience Management and Blockchain

However, that does not go far enough; in a pragmatic sense a Self-Sovereign Identity web enables an individual to have full rights and control on their

• Data
• Experience, online engagement and consumption of time/attention
• The entity’s creations (videos, articles, social media posts, followers/targeting)
• How all of the above are monetized!

Self-Sovereign-Identity will Transform Advertizing & Influencer Marketing

This is why I’m keen to support projects that have a vibe of the future, like how the WOM Token is trying to create a self-sovereign marketing platform. In the future, we’ll be able to barter our data for perks in a much more transparent form that favors the consumer and not the platforms that have mined our data without our expressed permission and given access to our data to third parties where we have no say how it is used.

Our online creations won’t be just for vanity metrics and fun or perceived influence, but with KPIs where what we do has actual value and not just by dumb algorithms of a like, comment or a mob impacted upvote. The idea that a person should pay an Ad-platform to target their content to the right audience, belongs to a legacy advertising industry.

In the future of the internet, education and targeting to the right audience, will instead be free.

SSI isn’t just about privacy online. It’s about our entire experience, in relation to brands, platforms, in games, on dating sites, in AR, in interactions with Voice-AI, through our videos and so much more!

Indeed the ideas of Self Sovereign Identity and decentralization are not new. But without both of these working, we are stuck in a web that has been corrupted. Misinformation, memes, anonymous aliases, trolling, cyber hacks, rampant phishing and identity theft, data exploits and clearly unethical tactics by Ad-platforms that use the consumer’s data against them means the first phase of the world wide web is coming to an end. So, what will take its place?

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all of us are endowed with the right to both sovereignty and privacy. I’m not sure companies like Facebook or Google got the memo. They did not become monopolies by playing fair. If China is becoming a technological police state, America has become a technological online dystopia where a serious decline in innovation has taken place. Instead of being part of the problem, if only the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent and others attempted to fix it?

Identity Management in an O2O World

Telegram Passport is a new feature that allows people to upload their real-world IDs. Facial recognition in China is becoming more ubiquitous in how to pay and access services.

Uploading my passport or driver’s license with a single tap makes sense to me if the benefits outweigh the risks. This is the problem with the evolution of Self-Sovereign-Identity; just as WhatsApp once promised to protect our privacy, it got synced with Facebook and all that info become part of our data-broker list of hundreds of thousands of data-points on us, all not within our own control.

We don’t own ourselves online, and that’s a major problem of the experience of the world wide web, it’s a broken dystopia of control, spam and information overload that’s not high quality.

We might consider that Blockchain technology has the potential to become the crucial breakthrough that is now propelling digital identity forward into the era of Self Sovereign Identity.

We Need to Rethink the Internet

It’s a leap to say that, we hope blockchain can create more trust and control for consumers. That is, if Big Tech lets it. More likely, big tech will just create the illusion of control. Like Facebook giving us privacy settings without any real control over our data and experience. Neither is the Government on our side, they like having back-doors and NSA type online monitoring. So where does that leave freedom, privacy and data privilege — basically human rights on the future of the world wide web? Not in very good hands.

Microsoft wants to be the “custodian of your data”, Google wants to be the AI-mesh of how you navigate your life, both online and offline (with Waymo). Who knows even what Facebook wants to be anymore, it’s suffering from too much privilege of data. Companies like Amazon and Tencent entering healthcare and banking, might be the future of self-sovereign data and identity, eventually.

Blockchain startups may fail to implement SSI simply because they don’t have the mechanisms or the pockets to attract users to their ecosystem. If they don’t have their own killer-app. If they fail to attract open-source developers to their ecosystem, they also have little chance of building something sustainable. If they fail to attract corporate partners and brands that help ground them in the real world, the same thing. They need to succeed on multiple fronts simultaneously while having the right timing in the evolution of SSI on the web; where the collective mood is right.

After the failures of Facebook in 2018, the mood for the emergence of Self-Sovereign Identity platforms is ripe. This is why you will see more articles on this and more rumblings about this at blockchain conferences. Consumers are fed up not being in control over their own privacy, data, online activities and personal brands — and all the human creativity and human rights, that these entail.