This week, the EU-funded project ABC4Trust, led by Prof. Dr. Kai Rannenberg, Goethe University Frankfurt, announced that they successfully implemented two pilot projects. The target of the project has been what Kim Cameron in his Seven Laws of Identity has defined as law #2, “Minimal disclosure for a constrained use”. It also observes law #1, “User control and consent”.
Using Microsoft’s U-Prove technology and IBM’s Idemix technology, the project enables pseudonymity of users based on what they call ABC: Attribute-based credentials. Instead of expecting a broad range of information about users, ABC4Trust focuses on the minimum information required for a specific use case, e.g. the information that someone successfully passed some exams instead of his full name and other personal information or just the fact that someone is above 18 years of age, instead of his full date of birth.
This aligns well with the upcoming UMA standard, a new standard, which is close to finalization. I will publish a post on UMA soon.
So there are working solutions enabling privacy while still confirming the minimum information necessary for a transaction. The biggest question obviously is: Will they succeed? I see strong potential for UMA, however the use cases in reality might be different from the ones being focused on in the development of UMA. I am somewhat skeptical regarding ABC4Trust, unless regulations mandate such solutions. Too many companies are trying to build their business on collecting personal data. ABC4Trust stands in stark contrast to their business models.
Thus, it will need more than academic showcases to verify the real-world potential of these technologies. However, such use cases exist. The concept of Life Management Platforms and more advanced approaches to Personal Data Stores will massively benefit from such technologies – and from standards such as UMA. Both help leveraging new business models that build on enforcing privacy.
Furthermore, ABC4trust shows that privacy and pseudonymity can be achieved. This might be an important argument for future privacy regulations – that privacy is not just theoretical, but can be achieved in reality.