Big idea: The Trust Paradox
As we put together the initial lineup and program for FWD50, we’re working on a central theme for our November event. With the pace of innovation and technology change, it’s hard to choose just one.
We’ve narrowed it down to six big ideas that keep coming up in travels and discussions. So over the next six posts, we’re going to look at each in a bit more detail.
On May 25, a watershed piece of privacy legislation, the General Data Protection Requirement, took effect in Europe — and because of the global nature of the Internet, its effects shook the digital world: Citizens can control how and where personally identifiable information is used.
That’s somewhat of a paradox. In order to let someone know how you’ll use their data, you need to be able to reach them. We demand superb interfaces and digital convenience. To deliver these, service providers demand context. Chatbots do better when they know us and our histories.
Balancing this tradeoff between open sharing and guarded privacy is tricky. Data is a two-edged sword. Every digital system requires digital identity; indeed, identifying a user as a single entity across all services produces the best results. I use Google Calendar, Google Inbox, Maps, YouTube, Keep, and myriad other services from the company — and when they’re connected, Google finds a flight receipt in my mail, puts it on my calendar, and offers driving directions on the day of my journey.
To best serve us, we need a single, central identity. But centralization breeds risk, making us vulnerable. If there’s anything we need to get right in digital government, it’s identity, because it’s the foundation of all other services.
This, then, is the trust paradox: We have the right to control what others know about us — but others need to know us in order for us to exercise those rights in the first place.
Current digital identity fixes like redress numbers focus on proving what we aren’t — separating us from the bad person on a no-fly list with whom we share a name. But those won’t scale. We need centralized, unambiguous identity in order to build the essential tools that rest atop it.
