Beyond the Buzz: self-sovereign identity

Identity has always been a difficult concept to define, especially in a digital context. In the early days of the Internet, sharing your identity online was perceived as something negative. Instead, people often made up nicknames or fictitious email addresses to hide their real identities. This changed with the launch of Facebook when, for the first time, users began to actively share their personal information online.

Over time, the boundaries between our real and online identities have gradually disappeared. Today, many digital services require you to connect with your real identity, while terms and conditions usually explicitly prohibit the creation of fake accounts. Moreover, account verification is more popular than ever. Seems like a great evolution, right? Yet there are still some significant issues to be resolved.

One of the biggest problems with online identity is that the Internet is set up in such a way that each time you visit a new online service, you need to create a new identity. This results in a hodgepodge of similar yet disconnected versions of yourself. Managing all these identities and their associated logins and passwords can be a real nightmare, especially for non-digital natives.

Ownership is also problematic: every time we create a new identity to access an online service, we put our data in the hands of third parties. In fact, instead of giving them only the specific piece of info they need, we tend to reveal way more than is actually necessary. For example, when you buy a bottle of vodka in a liquor store, all you really need to do is verify your age. But instead, you show or scan your full ID, which then also reveals your name, national registration number, gender, place of birth etc. The store, in turn, can then sell all your personal information to advertisers, essentially monetizing your identity for its own profit.

The concept of self-sovereign identity radically changes all of the above. It means that you only need one decentralized online identity, stored in a digital wallet on the blockchain, which can move between services and platforms, carrying with it all the relationships you've built there. This means you no longer need to build new identities from scratch and can easily switch services without all the hassle.

Even more importantly, SSI enables you to take back control of your personal data. If an HR manager wants to verify whether you’ve followed a specific course, you won’t have to send your entire curriculum. In fact, you don’t even need to share any documents at all, you can simply use your SSI to confirm that you’ve indeed followed this particular course. You have complete control over what information you reveal.

Although SSI was first put forward more than 10 years ago and has since been actively supported by a small group of privacy activists, three challenges have delayed its full adoption. These challenges relate to three classic areas of digital innovation: regulation, trust and transparency.

The solution to the first challenge is quite straightforward: to promote the widespread uptake of SSI, we need a solid framework with clear rules and constraints. Europe is working on ESSIF, a framework that supports SSI as a next-gen, open and trusted digital identity solution for all member states. In Flanders, SolidLab is developing data pods, which are similar to SSI, only without the blockchain technology.