Digital Identity – A complex technical landscape, but why?

👋Hi, NGI-ers!

My background has always been digital identity and the technologies developed around it. Recently, interest in decentralized digital identity or Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) has increased significantly😍

Within the NGI ecosystem, many funded projects, even an entire NGI program (see NGI eSSIF-Lab), have been more or less connected to digital identity.

At Danube Tech, we have also had the privilege of participating in various NGI programs to work on different aspects of digital identity. One of our projects was chosen as an NGI Impact Story in 2023 (see “Transatlantic SSI Interop”).

✨This focus makes sense✨

Considering that digital identity is such a fundamental topic, it is only natural that many participants of the NGI community are working on it in one way or another. Of course, we can expect even more interest in this topic with the rise of digital wallets and the eIDAS 2.0 regulation (if you’d like to learn more about those topics, I recommend articles by my friend Irene Hernandez of Gataca; see here and here).

🤔 But despite all the excitement, as a technologist, I am also constantly curious and more concerned about the technologies and standards that will make a decentralized digital identity ecosystem work – ideally on a global scale.

In this area, my subjective impression is that the landscape of technical standards has recently become vastly more complex. Even experts often need help understanding how different technical building blocks relate to each other, how they complement one another, or how they compete. The advantages and disadvantages of different technological choices, as are the motivations of actors promoting one technology or another, often need to be clarified.

One example is the data format for expressing digital identity credentials and the mechanisms for securing them. A potpourri of different terms and abbreviations for technical specifications exist:

✅ Some appear in well-known standards organizations.
✅ Others appear in more or less random Github repositories, sometimes only to disappear again several weeks later.

Efforts are spread across different organizations and communities, with varying degrees of communication and alignment between them.

A “digital identity wallet” can be built in many ways. So what makes a certain actor A argue for a certain technology X over another Y?

📌 Are the arguments about privacy?
📌 The ease of use?
📌 Compatibility with what exists already?
📌 Cool new features?
📌 Hidden political agendas or business interests behind some of the discussions?

To some extent, all of the above play a specific role.

However, in my next post and my NGI Talk (see below), I propose an entirely new way of looking at the reasons behind disagreements (even conflicts) in the current digital identity standardization efforts. That proposed way has to do less with concrete features and more with what a specific technology “feels” like.

What values and worldviews underlie technical standards? My article “Technology is not neutral: the worldviews behind standards” provides more information and three concrete examples.

---------

Important News: NGI Talk 📢

Are you curious about decentralized digital identity and want to learn everything about it, or are you just wondering about its complexities?

✨Join me in this NGI Talk: Technology is not neutral: the worldviews behind digital identity standards.✨

Let's uncover the essence of digital identity technologies together in this exciting activity!

👉🏼 Watch it now by clicking here.