Presented at
Kiwicon 2038AD: The Dystopic Future is Now (2018),
Nov. 17, 2018, 3:15 p.m.
(15 minutes).
It's 2038, and technology has become ubiquitous, and seamlessly interwoven with human existence. Authentication is a solved problem, your identity is something you control. Definitely gone are the days in which you remembered passwords of increasing complexity in a race against identity thieves, just so you could convince a remote party that a record in their database was in fact about you, every day anew. There aren't many at the pub anymore who ""get"" jokes about SMS for 2FA, either. The last instance of classical identity theft was decades ago, and machine-learning-backed continuous authentication has even rendered the $5 wrench insufficient.
The most recent iterations of the Privacy Act, and the GDPR have finally put the nail in the coffin of data-as-an-asset, especially when relating to the identities of people and machines. Data have been a huge liability since the late 2010s already, and it was only getting worse as autonomous vehicles took to the roads, our homes became electrified with IoT, and artificial intelligences had made industry 4.0 their own. Digital and physical identities had long merged, and any number of factors would come into play whenever you were identified in any given context, virtually, or in meatspace. People no longer had their bank accounts compromised, or phone contracts taken over; Now it was their whole existence on the line.
At times there were glimpses of hope around externalizing identity storage to distributed ledgers, such as ""the blockchain"", hypermeshes, and quantum meta-coils, but those just brought their own sets of problems. What people were quick to realise was that ""data on the blockchain"" were like herpes (not many people at the pub will remember this joke nowadays, either), and nobody felt comfortable with leaving an indelible trail of themselves out there. ""We won't put *actual* data on there"", they said. ""It'll be fun"", they said. But similar to how there used to be a time when you were worried about employers seeing those party photos on social media, people felt like their own identities were not something that belonged to them anymore, given the way in which distributed ledger technology essentially required system-wide consensus on each and every identity statement you ever wanted to make, not make, change, or remove.
Market research has shown that people want sovereignty in being able to identify however they would like in any given context, without the risk to presuppose your identity in one context through choices you've made in another. Furthermore, it became obvious that any concept of centralized (consented, albeit distributed) trust to suit all needs was only ever an illusion, and a shift of the problem into other spheres. Nobody doubts the authority of the several central instances, such as the smart contract handing out your universal base income. Especially if the choice to trust them is yours alone. But your identity is actually fluid, and so much more than any one of those representations of yourself.
In this short presentation, I offer an alternative approach to decentralized digital identity I've been involved with (since the late 2010s). We use all the same cutting-edge crypto as everyone else, but we're leaving it up to each and everyone who consumes data to decide whom they'd like to trust. And because the only central entity that ever deals with all your data is yourself, we're placing full control over your identity back into your own hands.
Presenters:
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Martin Krafft
Martin treasures his (and your) privacy, and believes that decentralisation is the next industrial revolution (that is if machine learning ever properly manages to claim 4.0).
He loves blockchain, but doesn't regard it as the holy grail. He actually finds projects such as Scuttlebutt much more exciting, and hopes that his girls will grow up in a peer-to-peer digital world, in control of their privacy.
He's currently focusing his energy on shaking up the digital identity space currently inhabited by countless BaaS approaches ("blockchain as a solution").
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