Identity is Already Decentralized. We Need Better Ways to Prove it

So I want to talk about how we can be better at proving people's identity, because I really want decentralized identity to work. And if we're gonna do that, we need to make sure it's inclusive and we need to make sure that everybody who needs to use these new digital services that are gonna become apparent because we have the ability to prove our identity more strongly and more readily that they can actually participate. So this is a, a, I think, a really important thing to do. So why does it matter? So this young man up here is Rodwell.

When Rodwell was nine years old, which was only a couple of years ago, he was attacked by a pack of hyenas in his native Zimbabwe. He lost one of his eyes, he lost his nose. You can see he's wearing sort of quite a facial bandage there. He lost a large part of his face and lots of other bodily injuries as well. He has since been through four different countries. He's had over 12 senior physicians working with him in five, at least five different hospitals around the world. Why is that a problem for identity?

Well, because to help Rodwell, what we need to do is be able to get access to all of the records that have ever been part of that intervention, right from the very beginning in Za Mywe with the accident and emergency doctors who initially dealt with him all the way through to where he is now in the us. And that's massively important. That will actually potentially save Rockwell's life.

So that's, so what we're doing is actually very important. But what's the problem I'm trying to talk about here? Evidence. Evidence is everything. Many of the talks you will have seen this week talk about how we can use ID cards and passports and these sort of very strong credentials to prove who people are. But we also need to think about people who don't have those things and they're real people.

My mother, for example, this isn't my mother by the way, but she's very similar to this, has no mortgage, she has no loans. She has, she doesn't bank online, she doesn't have a passport, she doesn't have a driving license. She has a very thin file, as we would call it in the credit world because she doesn't have do any kind of financial transactions like that. She has a phone, but it's not a smartphone. She doesn't engage in the internet very much. And when she does, she gets very baffled.

It's incredibly hard to onboard people like that when we're saying to them, well, if you're gonna access services, oh you need a smartphone and you need a digital identity and you, you need, how are you gonna onboard them? So we need to think of better ways to do that. 'cause we need to include people like Betty and it's not a new problem. These people have been around for a long time. Even in the UK where I live, we know that there are possibly 2 million people who don't have photo id. We don't have an ID card system in the UK either, and that's just in my country.

If you then reflect that around the globe, the peoples, you sitting here in the audience today, we are not typical. We have smartphones, we have access to these things.

We, we are not the majority of people in the world And it makes things like the strong processes of remote onboarding really difficult for large s swathes of the populations. So we need to think about how we can include these people because if it means I have to have a digital identity and a smartphone and a wallet to be able to access the best possible services, then we are actually potentially excluding the people who are most in need in society. But of course, we all have an identity. I don't cease to be me because I don't have an ID card.

I don't cease to be me because I don't have a passport. I've always been me. And there are many people who never have those things or never need to get those things until they need to engage with a digital service or a government. They might have a birth certificate, but that's next to useless. An online situation. They may have a college diploma, perhaps lots of things that you've got but you can't actually use very readily. So this is all about proof. But in society there are lots of ways of actually proving who we are. We have parents.

We live in certain parts of maybe in a village, in a town where people know us, where we've maybe lived and worked for many years. We are known to that cohort of people. That society, how can we leverage that? And the way we do that is through a process that we call vouching. So you might say, well, what's vouching?

Well, really it's giving some structure and some process to the ability to take that societal information about me and actually map that into something that we can trust as a proof of identity. As part of this, you need things like trusted agents. So people who are trained to understand what to look for, what questions to ask or evidence to look at that can go through the process of saying, I am who I, who I claim to be. They may as that part of that process capture other things as well. In some situations, they also capture a biometric, perhaps why?

Because we want to perhaps onboard them into the digital ID system, maybe get them that digital identity that they need. And this quite often happens, happens with national ID systems. So how do we make it safe and secure?

Well, we need some standards. Obviously we need principles. Now some of this work has already been done in the uk. We created an an annex to our good practice guide 45, which is the standard for identity verification, which allows you to then also vouch for individuals as well. The Scottish government are running a program right now for instance, where they're actually looking at how they can include large parts of society who wouldn't normally engage with them digitally by providing vouching. And other countries do this already.

I mean Rwanda is one example of that, but there are many others and we need to make sure it's safe and secure. What we don't want to do is create a two tier society digitally, if you like, where people who are vouched for are not seen to be as trustworthy as people who have a digital passport or an ID card. So we need a very clear process that allows us to not only have trained individuals doing this, but also to make sure that it's very closely scrutinized so that we can monitor and audit what happens. So why is this relevant to decentralized identity? You may ask?

Well, Because it helps us be inclusive. If what we're trying to do with decentralized identity is actually to make people's lives better, which is what I believe we're trying to do, then we also need to make sure we include all people in this or certainly all the people who want to engage because it often helps people like rodwell the people most in need in society who actually need assistance and the need to be able to take advantage of new services. So where do we go?

What we actually need to do is start to realize that people are the most important element of all these things we're designing. It's their requirements and their needs that are actually the most important. We need to think about the services that they might want to access, the restrictions they might have to be able to do that and to make sure that we can have that inclusive approach where yes, we might have remote onboarding, maybe we need vouching as well. So A few closing thoughts. I truly believe, and you will have seen this week, that we are at an access point here.

The work that's going on in digital wallets is massively important. The work in particular, I believe that's going on in in the European Union with the EUDI wallets is massively important. The potential power of that, not just for citizens of the eu, but also the wider effect that that will have on standardization, on the creation of secure wallets. The learning that we will get from interacting with services Incredibly helpful for the rest of the world.

Many other parts of the world are looking at this very closely, but what we have to remember is that as we do that, as we get the learning from what's happening here, we need to make that something that's inclusive, not just for people in my country and people here, but across the world because the most vulnerable in society are often those that we can help the most through providing digital services. Rodwell again. So how do we think about making things better in the first place? Make inclusivity a priority.

Then also think about what we do to take into account other methods of proving identity. Identity proof is not a chip on a card, it's not a passport. There is much more to that. Humans are far more diverse than that. So we need to take that into account because what we don't want to do is to start to create, as I say, two tiered digital societies. We don't want to exclude people from services that can make a massive difference in their life. We also need to advocate for standards.

There are plenty of standards that look at the technical aspects, the security aspects that look at how we can do wonderful things with digital onboarding. We need to think more about those human elements as well and standardize those so that we have the processes that are then accepted as part of that onboarding process as part of identity proofing and a part of verification so that we can include everyone in the work that we're doing. Thank you very much And thank you. A really thoughtful presentation here, moving us to a, a hybrid environment and and reality.

You know, we have so many tools at our hands that we could forget that not everyone has that. Yes. A question from the audience.

How, how can people come together and share ideas, thoughts, and make progress together on this? What options are out there for collaboration? So there are plenty of forums where we can talk about these kind of things. There are standards bodies out there, yes. But there are also discussions that are going on. For example, the city hub that met on Monday this week for example, brought together, together lots of people who've been at this conference. Lots of smart people who work in the standards world, who are working with service providers, who are technology folk.

Those kind of forums are really important because it gets a discussion going. We can then take those discussions into standardization and, and actually start to build real standards. There are plenty of other forums as well with go within governments where they're starting to do this kind of work.

It's, many of them make this information openly available, which is fantastic. The work that's going on in Scotland, for example, at the moment that I mentioned, is very much an open program where a lot of testing's going on.

So they, they actually are happy to get people to comment on those, those that work that they're doing. But I think yes, I mean the, the look for forums that are open like Citi or OIDF as well is another good place, open ID foundation where it's very open for ev anybody to attend and to join those things.

So yes, by all means just participate. Have you seen any examples of, of solutions that are approaching this?

Granted, there may not be a full inclusion in these solutions yet, but that's able to meet a, a, a use case for vision impaired, for example, or without access to digital solutions. What Do you think?

I mean, it happens in many countries actually. So I mentioned Rwanda was one example. The trusted introducer work there. Nigeria do a similar thing as well. It's a very important part of a national ID program quite often because one of the things the national ID has to appreciate is inclusivity. And much of the work that I get involved into the World Bank includes that because ultimately we're trying to help the whole of that society, not just a, a microcosm. So those processes are very important. It's done differently in every country though. This is the problem.

So there's no real standard at the moment. There's been some small attempts to do that in a more sort of generic way as, as we did in the UK some years ago. I'm actually writing a standard at the moment, which hopefully will cover much of this that will then be shared back into the standards world quite openly because I think we need to fill this gap. So I'm just trying to kickstart the process. Absolutely.

Is there a divide between the, the responsibilities of public services that have a, a citizen to, to government relationship as opposed to the private sector where they have a, a customer to service provider relationship and inclusion? I think in both cases, inclusion's important. It's usually more in the governmental sense because governments tend to try and provide social benefit services to the, to the public. So healthcare, for example, is one good example of that. That's less so in the commercial world. But I think there is definitely a place for it.

It gives greater reach to your customer base, if you want to think of it that way. Because I, I gave the example of my mother, she's very hard to reach digitally. Why? Because she doesn't feel able to engage in it and she can't prove who she is. So maybe if we make it easier for those kind of people to engage, then that opens up their ability to work with commercial organizations as well. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you.