Can social media giant such as Facebook contribute to develop a decentralized identity management system?
Blockchain technology makes decentralized identification (DID) possible. Given the decentralized and tamper-free nature of blockchain, individuals can create, own and control our own identifiers. We do not need to rely on internet giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit or other cooperations to issue an identifier to tell who we are in cyber-world.
Although decentralization offers advantages of better data privacy, advertising and content moderation, users will not switch to this new form of technology easily due to strong networking effects of the existing centralized platforms. To establish a widespread and industrial-scale decentralized digital identity management system with blockchain, collaboration of existing centralized social media behemoths is significant. Take what iO2 Foundation saw in Thai-Myanmar border refugees camp during our June and July site visit as example.
Facebook: the major identification data collector in Myanmar
In Myanmar, Facebook is now the major social media and identification registrar. Since Thein Sein’s government liberalized Myanmar’s closed telecommunications sector, internet penetration of the country has been surged from less than 1% in 2011 to around 25% in 2018, and mobile penetration from 56% in 2015 to more than 90% this year.
“A person without a Facebook identity is like a person without a home address,” declared the state-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar (view source). This is also the case in refugee camps at Thai-Myanmar border.
Surprisingly, camp residents communicate with each other mostly through Facebook, even replacing phone calls with Facebook Messenger voice calls.
Facebook also becomes the most important cross-border communication channel for refugees and migrants who have restricted freedom of movement. Although there are no official users statistics, camp residents told iO2 Team that, “Almost nobody in the camp uses phone calls anymore. We use Facebook Messenger to contact our friends and families who are scattered in different places in Thailand and Myanmar.”
Given Facebook has a large population of active users in Myanmar, the social media giant has collected hundreds of millions of refugees and migrants data. These identification data are valuable for governments, scholars and international humanitarian organizations to study refugees and forced migration. They can be potentially used for understanding the problems and needs of the marginalized.
Facebook and blockchain technology
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal has revealed that our privacy on the Internet is not absolutely safe from hackers. As Facebook has full control over 2.2 billion monthly active users’ data, how can this social networking giant keep our data being protected?
Blockchain is opening up a whole new solution. Facebook has already attempted to alleviate the refugees crisis in Myanmar through passively removing hate speech and misinformation sources. It would be a huge social responsibility add-on for the company to actively engage with refugees aid through providing decentralized identification and needs claims mechanism for the stateless population and ethnic minorities. The role of blockchain technology here is critical, as it helps to ensure data quality, validation and authentication.
It would be extremely exciting to see Facebook collaborating with international humanitarian organizations in utilizing personal and needs data of refugees and migrants to inform funding allocation decisions and aid deployment in the near future.
