How Digital Identity Expands Your Freedom
To understand how digital identities enable and expand your freedom, it’s important to realize how the current method of identity undermines and reduces your freedom.
We all have a name on our birth certificate, we used it in school, it’s on our drivers license and it’s used in all of our legal documents. It’s known pretty much universally as our ‘real name,’ however Balaji Srinivasan, tech entrepreneur and author of The Network State: How To Start a New Country, says a better word would be ‘state name’ or (in the US) ‘social security name.’ It’s the only identity we have outside of the digital realm.
The problem is these identities are managed on our behalf by the various branches and departments of the government. As a consequence, an ocean of what many of us would prefer to be private information is available to anyone worldwide. Not to mention the abysmal security of this information that is subject to thousands of data breeches annually.
And for about thirty bucks, your name and other basic information such as where you live can be used to reveal the following information in about ten minutes:
Any arrests, convictions, or criminal proceedings involving you
Details of your civil court cases including lawsuits, divorces, and bankruptcies
Voter registrations, and sometimes party affiliation
Business ownership, licensing, regulatory filings, and litigation
All the real estate you own and the property tax status
Your previous addresses over the last 30 years or so
All the phone numbers and email addresses associated with your name
Valuations of your home, the purchase price, size, condition, assessments, mortgages and liens
Your social media profiles, your photos, posts, and your comments
Your full employment history and level of education
And not only is all of this and more available to anyone with an internet connection and a few dollars, you are never notified who is doing this snooping into your personal business. And some very unscrupulous people have ways of weaponizing most of this info in ways that can make you a target. Own lots of property or have a high net worth? That makes you a good prospect for various nuisance lawsuits, banking hacks, and charity scams.
Why does any of this information need to be public? Why can’t you disclose it only to people that you agree have a good reason to know some of it? And who in the general public “needs” to know all of it?
Because of how your ‘state name’ is mismanaged, you and your property are made less safe. Your identity is out of your control. (And remember, my definition of Freedom is the condition of being in 100% control of your own property.)
Enter Digital Identity
The online world offers orders of magnitude better identity privacy, granularity, and flexibility than what a state name offers.
A so-called ‘decentralized identity’ permits anyone to control their own identity without reliance on any central authority. A blockchain-based identity system allows a user to store his or her identity data on a decentralized encrypted ledger via a network of thousands of otherwise unrelated computers. The owner can share all or some elements securely using his private cryptographic keys.
This tamper-proof identity can be used for transactions like banking and interactions with health providers. It can also facilitate uncorrupted voting, including the type of non-political voting every person does thousands of times per year when making voluntary consumer purchases and otherwise revealing their personal preferences and moral priorities. And it can do it all with total privacy.
Real Privacy
By way of illustration, here is just one capability of digital identity technology. There is a concept called zero trust architecture. It’s incredibly useful and powerful and, in layman’s terms, here’s how it works.
This is not my analogy, but I can’t find who first used it so as to give him credit. Imagine a U-shaped tunnel carved into the side of a mountain. A person can enter the tunnel from opening A or opening B and when they walk all the way through they can only exit from the other opening because it’s a simple U-shape. There are two people standing near the openings, Joe and Mary. Joe needs to know that Mary is who she says she is, but Mary does not want to disclose any personal information whatsoever.
So Joe turns his back and Mary randomly enters one side of the U-shaped tunnel into the mountain. Once she is well inside the mountain, Joe randomly chooses either the A or B exit and yells out that he wants Mary to exit that way, then he turns around to observe her exit. Importantly, at the halfway point of the U-shaped path, out of sight from Joe, is a vault door with a very complex combination lock for which only the real Mary could know the correct combination.
Mary uses her cryptographic identity information to unlock the vault door and continue out of the cave. In this way, Mary can be certain to exit from the required A or B opening as called out by Joe.
Obviously, even without the proper information, Mary could be right fifty percent of the time. (Whenever Joe randomly calls out the same exit she just used as an entrance.) However, passing this test correctly just thirty consecutive times proves by over a billion to one odds that Mary is who she says she is. Joe gets the evidence he needs that Mary is exactly who she says she is, and Mary has shared none of her information with anyone.
Compare that level of privacy (and security) to your state name and its visibility today to every snooper on your street and at your work, and every scammer around the world.
Digitally Compartmentalized Information
The glaring truth is that your physician does not need to know who is suing you and for how much. The airline you fly doesn’t need to know what real estate you own and how much the mortgages are. Your mortgage company doesn’t need to know what photos you posted on social media, and who you’re likley to vote for. Yet once any of them knows your state name they have access to all the above and more.
With a robust digital identity in place, you can have complete control over every disclosure you choose to make.
For example, when an airline sells you a ticket they mostly need to know that you aren’t a bad person bent on terrorism. In the digital realm it’s possible to provide an airline, or a mutually trusted third party company that vets people for risk, with your complete, lifetime travel history and other relevant historical information that demonstrates you are a trustworthy flyer - but not give the airline your state name or any other identifying information. Before boarding the plane you would only need to verify that you are the same person who bought that approved ticket.
Using the Joe & Mary example above, you can see that it’s technically and logically possible to prove you are the legitimate buyer of that security-vetted plane ticket without disclosing your name or other information. Ever.
And all of the above can be done in milliseconds, ensuring a planeload of good people who all have long histories of not being problem passengers or making threats of violence anywhere at any time. And all of them can travel with more than 100 ml or 3.4 oz of liquid in their bags - and keep their shoes on before boarding. Wow. Such freedom!
There are already hundreds of millions of these pseudonymous identities being used online today that are accumulating reputation for their owners. As this technology matures and use cases expand, it enables a vastly improved system of identification, authorization, and secure sharing of tightly defined identity information.
Control of your own property is what defines and enables true freedom. Digital identity is a freedom technology. A state name is antithetical to freedom because it is not under your control and there is almost no privacy.
The Takeaway
Our state name identities are not managed by us. They are managed by politicians and institutions who never have our best interest paramount. The state name ecosystem has degenerated into something that serves the financial interests of thousands of third parties without our permission. It’s so insecure that it’s subject to thousands of data breeches annually, and it allows any member of the public to know far too much about our personal and financial lives. Not controlling something as fundamental as your own identity is antithetical to true freedom.
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