Whenever something is too good to be true, it usually is – according to search engine. That phrase has been quoted so many times that no-one takes credit for it and that’s because it’s true. Self-sovereign Identification seems too good to be true but it’s got some hidden flaws, with the earmarks of social engineering.
The idea is grand but the infrastructure is quasi blockchain, in that it’s an old-boys club of tech giants that banded together to create the platform that would interface with the cloud. To use a metaphor; building toll boothes for the expressway on-ramp. It’s social engineering to gather information before the blockchain can decentralize the data.
There are a couple pure play Self-sovereign Identity project, for example Self-Key of Singapore. However, through the guise of good global governance and keeping people safe from identity-theft and data loss the UN and partners set the guidelines and created the framework that enable oversight of data-input and that’s where there’s potential of interference.
As a full disclose I am not a software engineer, just speculating based on my involvement and participation in webinars, development groups and online discussions. Having said that, I’m grateful that this pioneering work for Self-sovereign Identification is being done. Seriously, we should have built in the need for verification of Identity into the Internet from the start.
Social engineering is a very real threat to Self-sovereign Identification, as there are far too many massive corporations working together to get involved in every aspect of data and nothing is as valuable as Identity data, it’s the honey to the bee. Open source is the solution, to encourage more innovation.
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