Finally, A New World Evolves…

… Better Late Than Never

After all the difficulties we’ve had recently, last week I saw a glimmer of hope in building a more trusted world, and one which opens up the door for innovation and in the building a truly digital economy. This came with an announcement that the Scottish Government are moving forward with a Digital Identity Service for Scotland:

If it is done wrongly, it will fail badly — as did the last attempt for the UK to create an ID scheme. But, if it is done correctly — and where the latest methods around privacy-preserving methods, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and so on — it will be a massive step forward in building an economy of the future, and in creating citizen-focused systems.

I hope the work will be driven by both industry, experts and academia, and that we don’t end up with one large company pushing their current solutions. This new world must start with the citizen, and their rights, at the centre, and where identity plays the core role in this. If this is just a way to merge identities across the public sector into one, it will fail. We thus need to think through all of the possibilities, and make sure that we build systems around identity, but where the citizen has core rights. The rights to privacy must be implicit in such a system, and where consent is granted for each service.