Identosphere 232: July 29-July 5: Digital Convergence Initiative •Humanity Protocol • Bhutan Hackathon • Solid -> ODI • INGroup acquires part of IDEMIA
Upcoming:
20th IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management 2025 August 19-21, Copenhagen
Internet Identity Workshop #41 October 28-30, Mountain View, California
Digital Identity unConference Europe - moved to November dates TBD
GDC
[Video] (KuppingerCole) Digital Sovereignty vs Global Interoperability | EIC 2025 Interviews - Daniel Goldscheider
Can digital identity become a truly global infrastructure? In this bold and insightful interview, Daniel Goldscheider—founder of the Open Wallet Foundation—shares his vision for interoperable identity systems that transcend borders. He speaks with Mirela Ciobanu at EIC 2025 about decentralized identity, digital sovereignty, and why building trust across public-private lines is the key to long-term success.
Phone home dialogue continued
The Privacy Americans Are About to Lose (no Phone Home dialogue continued)
What stands out about current American driver’s license usage is how often no record is kept at all. A bartender glances at your birthdate and hands the card back[1]. A security guard checks your name and waves you through. A hotel clerk looks at your ID and returns it without scanning. These everyday interactions—the bulk of our daily ID usage—leave no digital trail whatsoever.
Gov News Around the World
Bhutan’s hackathon throws up 13 innovative solutions around decentralised ID
Leveraging its world-first decentralised digital ID, Bhutan welcomed 13 innovative solutions to improve public service delivery.
These ranged from tools designed to combat land fraud and streamline migrant worker compliance, to platforms for authenticating and trading artisan products and public listening.
Digital Wallets – Scotland’s Opportunity To Be At The Very Heart of the Global Digital Government Industry
The GLASS digital wallet, part of an EU project aimed at empowering citizens with control over their digital identities through self-sovereign identity (SSI). This system uses private-public key pairs for secure, citizen-controlled transactions, moving away from traditional third-party trust providers.
California’s Digital Identity Framework: Blueprint for Digital Wallet-based Identity Services
California’s Digital Identity Framework is a transformative system designed to streamline digital identity and program eligibility verification, enabling secure and equitable access to state services through a single, reusable digital credential.
Launched in 2022 and overseen by the California Department of Technology (CDT), the framework aims to simplify how Californians interact with government services by providing a digital counterpart to physical IDs, such as driver’s licenses or passports, allowing residents to prove their identity or eligibility for benefits like transit discounts or health services online.
New Frames coming from NGI for 2025 and beyond
Introducing the Open Internet Stack (OIS)
One such opportunity is the upcoming Open Internet Stack (OIS) —which aims to deliver a curated set of interoperable, open-source digital building blocks designed explicitly for ease of use and rapid deployment. These building blocks will cover critical areas like secure digital identities, cybersecurity, decentralized platforms, and interoperability. Simply put, the OIS will provide practical tools that public administrations, SMEs, and individual users can confidently adopt and adapt to their specific needs, thereby boosting Europe's global digital competitiveness.
Do not role your own digital ID system state wide!
Do not role your own digital ID system state wide!
The below article is shocking and a stark warning to not role out your own digital ID system at a state level, like was done in Australia.
Digital drivers licence anti-fraud technology described as 'cheap coding trick'
State governments are spruiking a "very cheap coding trick" as a high-tech anti-fraud measure for digital drivers licences, cybersecurity experts say.
New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria have developed separate digital drivers licences.
An "on-app hologram" featured on the NSW and Victoria licences has been spruiked as an anti-forgery measure.
Thoughtful
(Heather Flanagan) Resilience Isn’t Free: What Standards Can (and Can’t) Prepare Us For
Identity professionals usually talk about resilience as a technical or operational problem, how to recover when something fails. In my early days as a sys admin, disaster recovery and business continuity were my jam, so I get it. But from a standards and governance perspective, I keep coming back to a different question:
What kinds of resilience are current standards actually enabling? And where are we still pretending flexibility comes without cost?
Kyle En Hartog invites us to look back to look ahead.
The biggest issue I see with Digital Identity is that we're gaining "privacy" (we actually get less than self attested systems, but it's more explicit what's shared) and compliance, in exchange for our digital agency. The whole part of "self sovereign" was the agency. To take the agency bad from the intermediaries and place the importance of the user first. That's where the "own your data" concept came from, but somewhere along the way we put the holder secondary to the requirements of issuers and verifiers who were the same intermediaries that we were previously trying to dis-intermediate. -> What is "Sovereign Source Authority"?
Company News
Indicio and Nippon RAD Inc. announce partnership to bring decentralized identity technology to the Japanese market for seamless, secure authentication and access management
The partnership will focus on Indicio’s Proven Auth, a simple way to use powerful Verifiable Credentials for single sign on, account access and management, and protection against phishing.
(Indicio) New report: why “verifiable” doesn’t always mean Verifiable Credentials, and why that matters
A new report from Indicio’s VP of Governance, Trevor Butterworth, breaks down one of the most important questions in digital identity today: What makes a credential truly verifiable?
(Dock Labs) What if the customer was the master data record?
In our recent live event with Jamie Smith, he gave a presentation on how digital ID wallets can transform customer engagement by shifting control of verified data to the individual.
(Turing Space) In Step with NATO Summit, Turing Europe Launches in The Hague to Support Europe’s Digital Resilience
Turing Europe, the EU headquarters of a global cybersecurity innovator Turing Space specializing in eID and digital credentials, has officially launched operations in The Hague.
(IDNow) From SES to QES: Everything your business needs to know about digital signatures in 2025.
So, you’ve decided to integrate digital signatures into your tech stack, but don’t know where to start. Here we help you understand the difference between an SES, AES and QES, and the importance of a QTSP.
Research
Privacy Preserving Identity Federation: A Literature Study
Identity Federations (IFs) raise significant privacy concerns as Identity Providers (IdPs) can track user activity and Service Providers (SPs) may mismanage sensitive user credentials. This survey systematically reviews ten years of Privacy Preserving IF research to analyze privacy requirements, enhancement techniques, formalization approaches, enforcement assurance methods, and alignment with authentication standards to assess the rigor and practical deployability of proposed solutions.
Eyebrow-Raising Acquisitions
IN Groupe completes acquisition of Idemia Smart Identity
Idemia Smart Identity, the biometrics and identity verification arm of French digital identity and security brand Idemia. It is the largest acquisition ever for the 500-year-old firm, which has its roots in the French Renaissance, and is now aiming to capture the EU digital identity market.
AI and Identity
Cloudflare Now Blocks AI Web Scraping by Default
Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, has begun blocking AI web crawlers by default unless they receive direct permission from site owners. This new policy changes the longstanding practice where AI developers could freely scrape the web to train large language models (LLMs).
South Dakota to push ahead with age verification law following SCOTUS opinion
Porn laws likely to stick, but NetChoice continues grinding at social media legislation
Standards
Public Review Period for Proposed OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance 1.0 Final Specification
The OpenID Digital Credentials Protocols (DCP) Working Group recommends the following OpenID Final Specification:
OpenID Foundation and CSC partner to strengthen ID ecosystem
OIDF leads critical discussion [at the Internet Governance Forum] on digital identity futures:
(OpenID Fnd) Balancing sovereignty and interoperability
At the recent Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2025 in Lillestrøm, a pivotal conversation about one of the most pressing challenges facing developing and least developed countries (DLDCs) took place - how can digital identity interoperability be balanced with national sovereignty?
[Webinar] Enhancing Trust using Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) @ToIP EGWG 2025-06-26: Aakash Guglani,
Briefing Document: India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) revolutionize financial inclusion, bringing over 500 million people into the digital economy. This open-source, mobile-first system builds trust and breaks traditional payment monopolies.
DKMS Alliance Kick-off in Geneva: Building Now the Future of Digital Trust
On June 30th, Geneva became the stage for an informal event: the kick-off meeting of the DKMS Alliance. This gathering marks the official launch of a collaborative initiative poised to reshape digital trust infrastructure for the next generation.
ODI and Solid: Building a future where data works for everyone
From October 2024, the ODI will bring Solid - an open standard developed to give individuals and organisations greater control over their data - into its broader data stewardship activities. The Solid project, protocol, and community will now become part of the ODI’s activities to promote secure, ethical data sharing and build a more transparent, secure, and user-centric data ecosystem.
Humans working in AI
The 10x “overemployed” engineer
The 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can stars Leonardo Di Caprio as a talented 19-year-old fraudster, who forges millions of dollars in checks while pretending to be a doctor, a lawyer, and even an airline pilot. That Hollywood film now has echoes in the tech industry, in a story which has come to light in Silicon Valley.
A software engineer in their mid-twenties, based in India, successfully scammed approximately a million dollars annually from tech startups by excelling in interviews, getting hired remotely, and then not doing their assigned work, all while being simultaneously employed by many companies.
Another New Group Department
📢 𝗜𝗗 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱!
The 𝟱𝘁𝗵 𝗗𝗖𝗜 (Digital Convergence Initiative) 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲 kicked off today, held in a hybrid format at the Geneva International Conference Center. This committee will focus on interoperability standards between Identification Systems and Social Protection Systems. Comprising experts from 20 diverse organizations, including government agencies, international organizations, digital public infrastructure (DPI) initiatives, digital public goods (DPGs), the private sector, and individual specialists—this committee is well-prepared for the tasks ahead.
“Not World” - Humanity Protocol
What Is Humanity Protocol (H) and How to Get Started?
Humanity Protocol is building the human layer of the decentralized internet with a breakthrough solution: Proof-of-Humanity. It uses palm biometrics and zero-knowledge cryptography to verify real humans without compromising privacy. From accessing dApps to earning Fairdrops, users can now prove their uniqueness with just a palm scan, privately, securely, and Sybil-resistant.
Decentralized Identity Provider Humanity Protocol’s H Token Booms After ‘Fairdrop’
Using palm scans, Humanity has developed a tool that enables airdroppers to block bots and prevent users from claiming tokens using multiple identities.