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Where better to spend a day talking about digital identity than the Venetian in Vegas with its rather synthetic identity.
In giving the topic a full day track, the Money 20/20 organisers have recognised the increasing importance of the topic. However it is a topic that is not straightforward. Andrew Nash from Capital One was right when he said everyone has a different definition of identity. It’s a bit ironic – identity doesn’t have an identity. Here are three questions to summarise what we heard:
Is digital identity just about KYC or the broader sharing of personal data?
There is clearly still a lot of pain with KYC. Idemia explained how in the US, with its fragmented environment, doing basic things creating digital drivers licences that can be used across the country is hard.
But there is shift of focus from the narrow KYC problem towards the broader issue helping people to make their personal data portable in a way that removes friction – the “F” word of Identity, as Neil Chapman from Forgerock put it.
Filip Verley from Airbnb made a useful bridge between these two aspects. It is no surprise that reputation is fundamental to the Airbnb platform. Reputation is the where the value is – Airbnb users don’t care what the name of a renter is but they do want to know they are reputable. But for that to work well that reputation needs to be anchored to the real identity that Airbnb has checked – i.e. their KYC.
Who is digital identity for – the person or the organisation?
Quite rightly there is now widespread acceptance that digital identity needs to be person centric. As well as the privacy point, there are practical reasons why it makes sense to put the person at the centre. For example, the person is in the best place to say which of the residential addresses associated with them is the one where they are actually living.
This is not the same as saying people own their identity. The organisations that provide services to people also have a stake in digital identity too. That’s why in Canada, as Joni Brennan explained, stakeholders across the economy are collaborating through the DIACC to address a need that is bigger than any one of them.
(Bianca Lopes, Joni Brennan and I talking about Digital Identity in Canada)
What will enable interoperable digital identities?
Unsurprisingly there was good representation from the DLT / blockchain crowd including Civic and Shyft. Heather Vescent gave a great overview of the standardisation work around Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and the desire of that community to create a new identity layer on the internet – perhaps an 8th “user” layer on top of the OSI 7-layered model of old. Whilst this work is being done through W3C it is still early days.
In contrast, FIDO2 is now a candidate recommendation in W3C and is already supported by Chrome 70 for Android (released last week) meaning that ubiquitous strong device based authentication (which includes biometrics) should not be far off. It’s great to see an initiative that, after a lot of hard work, looks like its about to become mainstream providing a real step forwards towards a more secure digital world.
