Joe Andrieu
Jul 27, 2017 · 1 min read

Thanks for the base definition.

Does this also suggest you don’t care about how identity is used to track people independent of the requirement “to satisfy a verifier in the context of a specific transaction”?

This definition ignores the privacy problems of
(1) the surveillance economy,
(2) big data, and
(3) inappropriate state surveillance

Your definition gives a good framing for my problem with identity as attributes within a system. Yes, it helps simplify the engineering task so you can build a system, but it ignores the inevitable consequences of unaddressed externalities.

Identity is fundamentally intertextual — the point is to recognized entities across contexts, e.g., across time, space, or digital domains. Limiting the definition to single systems obscures the problems that will be created external to those systems.

And that is why current identity systems do such a poor job respecting privacy.

    Joe Andrieu

    Written by

    Tech Entrepreneur

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