I’m neither in favorof it nor against it.
The real power these days rests in the hands of whoever decides what’s mandatory or not.
Banks would abuse online banking to the Nth degree, if Federal Government regs didn’t bind them.
The FDA medicine regulations would not exist had it not been for decades of total market abuse by a Wild West, unregulated, unqualified, or even just plain negligent, private enterprise chancers leading to scandals like thalidomide.
In the past, regulatory focus has been on what the individual can or can’t do. That is wrong.
It’s not the private citizen that needs to be the focus of regulatory constraints - it’s overpowered commercial interests and lobbies
market distortion by serial abusers, organized crime, the “too big to fail” industries that are propped up by an endless supply of state subsidies...
The private citizen can’t expect that regulation, which ultimately exists to benefit the consumer and constrain criminal enterprise, to exist in a vacuum.
This is a profound difference to everything that’s happened before in the digital age. But it needs a revisitation of civic responsibility and the relationship between the individual, the community, the state and the private sector.
There are 70 million people in Britain and if 35 million of them took an active interest in cleaning up their doorsteps and communities the police could focus on the really important stuff instead of getting bogged down by trivial neighborhood disputes and people getting offended by today’s bad words. (That is the essence of Thatcherism).
So what does that look like in the identity context?
Imagine you had a locked briefcase, handcuffed to your arm, with all your secrets in it and only you could open it. Nothing short of a subpoena with a defined reason and approved justification could compel you to share any content of the briefcase against your will.
The digital wallet is basically just that, but in cyberspace. It can be a state issued wallet or a company wallet or a health provider’s wallet, but any which way you see it, it’s important you understand it’s your wallet not theirs.
The question is, under what circumstances would you accept ANYONE accessing / modifying your wallet(s) without your explicit consent... If you couch that question only in terms of state actors you are completely missing the point.
Or, the short version:
Data protection laws are predicated on the assumption that whoever stores the data is it’s custodian, ergo they “own” it.
The chief problem that creates is, you don’t own your own identity. The agency that creates and then stores it on your behalf owns it.
That means they get an enormous amount of control over what it looks like and what it can be used for.
Self Sovereign Identity is about saying - it’s MY data, I decide what goes in it, I decide who has access to which bits of it, I can see how it’s used... because I am the primary user of it.
My digital wallet is like my physical wallet. NOBODY touches it without my permission.
Imagine you had a locked briefcase, handcuffed to your arm, with all your secrets in it and only you could open it. Nothing short of a subpoena with a defined reason and approved justification could compel you to share any content of the briefcase against your will.
The same could be said of my private parts.
In an earlier, more-innocent age, no respectable citizen (e.g., airline passenger seeking to board his flight) would have been compelled to undergo an "intimate" body search. Even a light frisking would have been viewed as outrageous. But now, even small children and 80-year-old nuns are required to undergo a frisking and/or mm-wavelength scanning - and we are only one short step away from full-blown cavity searches.
We all know the reasons for this - but it is still something that we should not grow accustomed to.
My concern is that this "digital wallet" would soon come to be taken for granted. One major terrorist incident, and there would be calls for requiring that a "backdoor" be installed. And even if that weren't the case - more and more places of business and/or govt. offices would simply deny service unless you were willing to "drop your pants."
"See! We aren't infringing upon your privacy rights! It's just that, if you want to mail a letter, you've got to give us access to your digital wallet!"
Regards,