Visiting doctors and applying for membership may need to provide identification documents for confirmation and record. With the popularization of the real-name system, more applications need to provide identity certificates for registration, for example, games and social media are the scenarios of identity applications.
In addition to registering identities with physical documents, we also create different identities on the Internet. For example, in the same game on different servers, we may have different characters.
01 Identity Provider
We may create a new account with each new application download. These different network services have their identity systems, and the systems of different applications do not communicate with each other and are very fragmented.
The emergence of the “identity provider” solves the problem that the identity system does not circulate among different software, requiring re-registration every time, and the process is complicated.
“Login with WeChat/QQ” provides the connection of authentication, allowing other service providers to quickly connect, without the need to establish their user authentication and management systems.
02 The problem reappeared?
The possibility of “duplicate verification” may be a problem that modern people often encounter in the physical and online world. If you open an account with a different bank, you will have to go through a similar identity establishment and review process every time, and you need to provide a lot of information such as an address, identity certificate, etc. Each bank verifies the identity, but only stores the user information in its database, and the user information is duplicated and isolated. When the information changes, or want to change the bank password, the user needs to go to the institution system to make changes, which makes it difficult to maintain personal information effectively.
Even though online banking provides the convenience of changing the information, sometimes it is unavoidable to go to the institution in person to change the identity information.
03 More questions arise???
The popularization of the Internet has not been accompanied by the improvement of the identity system. Internet violence and human flesh incidents are not uncommon, and people’s identities on the Internet are connected by those who have a heart and in reality.
These internet giants have also discovered the value of users’ data, recording them for research or personalized advertising. The huge advertising profits among them feed the Internet giants, who treat this personal data as the private property of the company and profit from it. The value of these personal data and identity systems no longer belongs to the users themselves but becomes the private property of large corporations.
Every time we download a new app, we often omit the app’s permission to access the phone. In disguise, they secretly obtain a lot of personal information that is not related to the provision of services.
What is even more frightening is that these big companies do not properly preserve user data. Data privacy leaks abound, and every major incident affects hundreds of millions of users around the world.
04 Facebook personal information leaked
Due to the unfriendly nature of Facebook’s terms of use in 2014, third parties can obtain users’ data through the app usage contract without the user’s initiative to set privacy and non-disclosure.
In 2015, Facebook found that “Cambridge Analytica” company improperly used Facebook users’ personal information. Cambridge Analytica is a psychological testing app created in 2014 by Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan.
However, after asking the other party to delete the data, Facebook did not actively follow up and confirm, nor did it inform the affected users, which made Facebook’s emphasis on user privacy protection in recent years, and disappeared.
Returning the ownership of the user’s identity data to the user himself has become an urgent market issue.
05 Decentralized Identity
Decentralized identity DID (Decentralized Identity) seems to be the best solution to solve personal data protection recently. It advocates abandoning the framework of identity providers and returning the ownership of personal data to users.
People can manage their data through their mobile app and protect sensitive information through biometrics and encryption.
The Entity or Organization responsible for certifying the identity uses the public and private keys to sign and annotate the signature on the user’s identity, which is equivalent to the action of issuing certification, and the user can recognize the identity through these certifications.
For example, government departments wholesale driver’s licenses, and then use the department’s private key to sign the electronic file of the driver’s license and annotate it on the public’s DID. When we need to show a driver’s license, we only need to authorize one piece of personal data to the relevant organization. If you provide an electronic certificate when using a car rental service, you can save the process of confirming your driver’s license and quickly verify your identity.
In this case, the government department is the identity giver, the public is the identity owner, and the car rental company is the service provider. The difference with the traditional practice is that the custody of the identity is not on the giver, but on the owner, that is, the citizen.
06 Preview
In the next issue, we will continue to delve into the concept of DID, how to use the blockchain to keep these public keys, and how to realize the autonomy of the user’s “identity record”. Stay tuned!
