digital identity - Consult Hyperion

Connecting is getting easier, disconnecting is getting harder

3rd December 2015by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

After I’d been blathering on at some event about how connecting things up is really but disconnecting them is really hard, someone sent me a link to a story illustrating an amusing case of the unexpected consequences of connectivity. A woman found out her husband was cheating on her with nanny because he had photos and texts on his iPhone, which was linked by iCloud to her iPad.

Gwen Stefani apparently discovered Gavin Rossdale was cheating on her after discovering some explicit texts and photos on the family’s iPad.
[From A guide on how to not let an Apple device ruin your marriage – NY Daily News]

I didn’t know who Gwen Stefani was, so I went off to goggle her on my skyper (as England’s greatest living poet, John Cooper Clarke, would put it) hoping that she might be a junior minister at the Home Office or an executive a technology company, but it turns out she’s a pop singer. Oh well. There’s no reason to expect pop stars to understand Apple’s settings any more than I do, so I put the story to one side. Until this morning, that is.

This morning I went through my browser history to try and find a page about a workshop that I was supposed to be going to. I couldn’t remember the name of the workshop, but I knew I’d been to the web site in the last day or two so I opened up my browser history. And found hundreds of web sites dealing with carpet remnants.

My wife and I are a very traditional couple. We share everything. It’s in our marriage vows. The bank account, the speeding tickets, the browser history. And we don’t have a nanny. So I don’t care about my wife seeing my browser history and she doesn’t care about me seeing hers. The reason I mention this episode though is to make a point: connecting things up is getting progressively easier, but working out who should be able to access what and when and under what circumstances is becoming increasingly complicated.

In fact, I’m tempted to say that it’s becoming so complicated that it will soon be beyond human comprehension. When I take a photo with my iPhone, I already have literally no idea where it will end up, and why some photos show up on my laptop and others don’t is completely baffling. (Although I have noticed that when I actually want to find a photo that I can remember taking a few months ago, I can never find it.)

Today it’s your photos, tomorrow it’s your financial transactions, soon it will be your identity that is unpredictably smeared through the interweb tubes with predictably chaotic results. Time for some thinking about identity partitioning and permissioning: more soon.

Shared ledgers might not disrupt payments, but identity

21st October 2015by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

Thanks to Marc Hochstein from American Banker for pointing me to this video of the Stanford Blockchain Workshop that he chaired in March. If you are interested in the subject of blockchains, identity and reputation then put your feet up get a cup of tea and enjoy watching some really smart people introduce a lot of really interesting concepts.

Panel: Casey Fenton (Sovolve / Couchsurfing), Patrick Deegan (ID3/OMS), Primavera De Filippi (LOVE), Muneeb Ali (Onename)
[From Stanford Blockchain Workshop (March 2015)]

These people are on to something. And they are not the only ones. A similar gathering of the great and good (how come that classification never includes me!) on Richard Branson’s island came to a similar conclusion, highlighting identity as one of their four key application areas for the blockchain.

We discussed that the identity stack is a core application for the blockchain, it’s a critical piece for further development and needed for a trusted information economy system.
[From Richard Branson’s Necker Island And The Blockchain Summit (Part 2) | Vancouvered Weblog]

Bearing in mind that I always interpret the word “the blockchain” in these circumstances to mean “some sort of shared ledger that will probably be permissioned in some way”, I think they may be right.

So our identities could be verified by reference to a series of our blockchain transactions. For privacy and security reasons, each blockchain transaction should be coded so as not to give away much information about the transaction itself.
[From The Fine Print: Of #Blockchains And #MultiFactorAuthentication]

This kind of idea deserves serious examination. The idea that I might demonstrate some attribute to a third party by demonstrating ownership of a transaction output on a blockchain is interesting, especially when combined with smart contract stuff. It’s an exciting field. There are companies like Shocard and OneName already active in the space and new ones coming along all the time. For many of our financial services clients, radical reduction in the costs of identity-related compliance are a much higher priority than some marginal reductions in transaction costs.

I think we can begin to speculate about the use of a permissioned ledger to hold KYC information and the merging of auditing and compliance to replace AML “gates” with permanent monitoring of transactions on a blockchain (more on this tomorrow), the restoration of financial services in accordance with the FATF risk-based approach on a per-transaction basis. This would really be a new world, and would be really a revolutionary use of shared ledger technology.

The phoney war is over, part 2

28th October 2014by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

In the battle for your digital identity, the banks do have some advantages. But they need a strategy, because the technology, business and social roadmaps are not as stable as they seemed.

Continue reading “The phoney war is over, part 2”

Yes we KANZ

10th September 2014by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

The discussions around digital identity and digital money down at the KANZ Summit in Auckland left me convinced that they remain mobile-centric for the foreseeable future. They also left me convinced that this whole Internet of Things thing hasn’t really been thought through.

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Identity, so I hear, is the new money

12th June 2014by Consult Hyperion2 Comments

The CSFI roundtable on my book “identity is the new money” left me utterly depressed. Every single book sold was sold for cash. I will never recover from the embarrassment and public humiliation. Still, at least they sold some.

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HCE is launching

17th February 2014by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

HCE and BLE are going to make Barcelona fun this year, and they are opening up an important new role for mobile operators.

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Service Opportunities for Mobile Identity

28th January 2014by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

I still think that mobile identity is a real opportunity for mobile operators to provide a valuable service and occupy a key position in the future value network.

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Real-time identity

17th January 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

Naturally, given my obsessions, I was struck by a subset of the Real-Time Club discussions about identities on the web at their evening with Aleks Krotoski. In particular, I was struck by the discussion about multiple identities on the web, because it connects with some work we (Consult Hyperion) have been doing for the European Commission. One point that was common to a number of the discussions was the extent to which identity is needed for, or integral to, online transactions. Generally speaking, I think many people mistake the need for some knowledge about a counterparty with the need to know who they are, a misunderstanding that actually makes identity fraud worse because it leads to identities being shared more widely than they need be. There was a thread to the discussion about children using the web, as there always is in such discussions, and this led me to conclude that proving that you are over (or under) 18 online might well be the acid test of a useful identity infrastructure: if your kids can’t easily figure out a way to get round it, then it will be good enough for e-government, e-business and the like.

I think the conversation might have explored more about privacy vs. anonymity, because many transactions require the former but not the latter. But then there should be privacy rather than anonymity for a lot of things, and there should be anonymity for some things (even if this means friction in a free society, as demonstrated by the Wikileaks storm). I can see that this debate is going to be difficult to organise in the public space, simply because people don’t think about those topics in a rich enough way: they think common sense is a useful guide which, when it comes to online identity, it isn’t.

On a different subject, a key element of the evening’s discussion was whether the use of social media, and the directions of social media technology, lead to more or less serendipity. (Incidentally, did you know that the word “serendipity” was invented by Horace Walpole in 1754?) Any discussion about social media naturally revolves around Facebook.

Facebook is better understood, not as a country, but as a refugee camp for people who feel today’s lack of identity-forging social experience.
[From Facebook: the heart in a heartless world | spiked]

I don’t agree, but I can see the perspective. But I don’t see my kids fleeing into Facebook, I see them using Facebook to multiply and enrich their interpersonal interactions. Do they meet new people on Facebook? Yes, they do. Is that true for all kids, of all educational abilities, of all socio-economic classes, I don’t know (and I didn’t find out during the evening, because everyone who was discussing the issue seemed to have children at expensive private schools, so they didn’t seem like a statistically-representative cross-section of the nation).

Personally, I would come down on the side of serendipity. Because of social media I know more people than I did before, but I’ve also physically met more people than I knew before: social media means that I am connected with people who a geographically and socially more dispersed. I suppose you might argue that its left me less connected with the people who live across the street from me, but then I don’t have very much in common with them.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

privacy

Masters key

23rd November 2010by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] This whole internet thing is getting more and more complicated. I’m trying to work out what government policies toward the internet are, so that I can help our clients to develop sound long-term strategies with respect to digital identity. To do this, we need to understand how the security environment will evolve and what the government’s attitude to security is. Should people be allowed to send data over the internet without interference? The US government thinks so.

Since 2007, Congress has inserted a total of $50 million of earmarks into the State Department’s budget to fund organizations dedicated to fighting Internet censorship.
[From Rebecca MacKinnon: No quick Fixes for Internet Freedom – WSJ.com]

Uh oh. This cannot be popular with people in favour of internet censorship, such as U2’s boss.

U2 manager Paul McGuinness said that the only reason the music industry had tanked over recent years was not because outfits like U2 peddled the same boring crap that they did in the 1980s, but because of the introduction of broadband.
[From Comment: Broadband only useful for pirates – U2 manager screams blue murder | TechEye]

Setting aside the fact that the British music industry earned more money than ever before last year, U2 are totally wrong to expect the rest of society to pay to uphold their business model in face of all technological change. Bono is wasting his time calling for Chinese-style internet censorship in order to maximise record company profits, or at least he is if the US government is going to continue funding the opposition.

Continue reading “Masters key”

China syndrome

17th November 2010by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

[Dave Birch] What should government policy on identity be? Not specifically our government, or EU governments, or any other government, but governments in general. Or, let’s say, governments in democratic countries. OK, that’s a very big question to tackle. Let’s narrow it down to make a point: what should government policy on the internet be? No, that’s still too big and perhaps to vague. Let’s focus down further on a simple internet question: should the government be allowed to see what is going through the internet tubes. Of course! One of their jobs is to keep me safe from drug-dealing Nazi terrorist child pornographers who formulate devilish plots with the aid of the web.

According to reports, the FBI is asking for the authority to require all Internet communications platforms build in a “backdoor” allowing law enforcement easy wiretapping access
[From Should Government Mandate “Backdoors” for Snooping on the Internet? | Center for Democracy & Technology]

In parallel, the FBI is talking to technology companies about how they could be making it easier for criminals to see your credit card details and for the government to read to your e-mail.

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms [including Google and Facebook] about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.
[From F.B.I. Seeks Wider Wiretap Law for Web – NYTimes.com]

This, superficially, sounds likes a good idea. Who could object? We don’t want the aforementioned Nazi drug-dealing child pornographers plotting terrorist acts using the interweb tubes with impunity. No right-thinking citizen could hold another view. But hold on…

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
[From U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google – CNN.com]

It’s not that simple, is it? If you create a stable door, then sooner or later you will find yourself bolting it long after the horse has had it’s identity stolen. What I can’t help but wonder about in this context is whether the content actually matters: suppose you can’t read my e-mail, but you can see that a lot of mail addressed to Osama bin Laden is coming from my house? Surely that would be enough to put me under suspicion and trigger some other law enforcement and intelligence activity?

Continue reading “China syndrome”