Identosphere 214: Block/TBD Contributes Code to DIF • Traceability of Agriculture and Food • Decentralized Storage for SSI • Bluesky updates
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You’ve got 25 minutes to make it to your connecting flight… Before you’re down the airbridge, your airline has messaged you with the location of the next flight and, using the GPS on your phone, is sending you directions and showing you where you are on a map. It asks whether you want to share your location data with the gate.
SoverClaim differentiates itself in four ways. First, t consolidates key functionalities of existing systems, such as creation, presentation, and encryption of digital identities. Second, it enables efficient and secure storage of identity documents with sharing and deletion. Third, it further ensures accountability and auditability through decentralized identifiers and audit logs. Finally, it adopts standard protocols for the creation of identification, with a strong emphasis on minimizing user data disclosure when accessing online services. (pdf)
Block contributes components developed under Web5 umbrella to DIF: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials, and Decentralized Web Nodes.
These open source repositories were previously developed by Block over several years for decentralized identity advancement.
Governments attempting to stand up digital identities are aiming at a moving target, between the evolving expectations of citizens, maturing technologies and emerging interoperability requirements. But as Gartner Director Analyst Arthur Mickoleit said during a webinar on “Government’s Role in Getting Digital Identity Right,” to hit that target they must avoid falling for a few persistent myths.
When organizations collect data to adopt a digital ID or wallet, they risk creating more copies of personal data in more repositories than before. Of course, the idea is to create less of a data footprint if things go right with the process, but if things go wrong—for instance, the issuer does not delete the credentials or they hold on to it for far too long—then it only compounds the problem.
The identity system being public, anyone can access arbitrary parts of the data [...] One person in particular took a 1M post window of that firehose and uploaded it to Hugging Face as an ML training dataset; which seems like an insignificant thing... and boy it blew up.
I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protocols and projects, and raises the bar on analysis in this space. However, I disagree with some of the analysis, and have a couple specific points to correct.
