Reclaiming Our Identities: Why Decentralised Identity Matters

From our very first breath, we are all given an identity. Our name allows those around us to know which family are we from and therefore determine their relationship with us. As we develop, our identities grow with us as we create our own relationships with friends, family, and even organisations (university, workplace, hobbies). Societies are built on identities as it enables people to contextualise how trustworthy an individual is based on the reputation that accompanies that identity.

This trust is what enables relationships to form and societies to flourish. While trust can be established by getting to know the person directly, the larger the society grows, the less feasible this becomes. Moreover, for certain relationships such as buying your groceries, the seller doesn’t need to know a person’s character but rather their ability to pay. As such, modern societies rely heavily on trusted third-parties to determine whether a person is trustworthy based on their identity. This also applies in the literal sense as current web technologies requires individuals to hand over ownership of their own personal information in order to access various services.

With the rise of the internet, we have all gotten used to creating an account with each and every platform that we need to interact with. Think of all the websites which you use daily and you start to see how much of our identity is spread across the web. Nowadays, single-sign on (ie. login with google/facebook/appleId) has made the user experience much better but the fact still remains that your accounts are not your own:

Your personal data is stored on the organisations servers
The organisation determines what personal info gets shared and who has access
You are not privy to the richness of your own social relationships

Even more worrying, there is no incentive for these platforms to hand ownership of your data back to you as it diverges from their profit motive. For example, if Facebook has all the data on who I interacted with and what content I consume, it can then sell that information to other companies for more targeted ads and services. All these relationships form part of your identity but leaving any of these platforms also means losing part of your identity.

Reclaiming Ownership

Identity is not what you say about yourself, but what others say about you — Jared Hanson (see youtube video below)

The quote above sums up the current identity landscape very nicely. In essence, the current system leaves out the most crucial stakeholder: You.

Decentralised identity is about putting the individual back in control of their own identity so that they can decide for themselves how their personal data is shared. This includes enabling trusted interactions while still preserving privacy due to the capabilities of cryptography. All of this without having to rely on a middleman to validate your identity.

The ability to have trusted relationships directly with another individual opens up many new and novel social relationships which have yet to be imagined. This will unlock massive network value as relationships are no longer limited to just organisations (ie. there are exponentially more individuals than organisations). As succinctly summarised by Donovan Choy:

Web3 digital identity represent a credible alternative to formulating digital identities in a decentralized, bottom-up manner.

Great Resources:

Decentralised Identity Shorts: