The Future of Digital Identity – DRAFT SUMMARY
Insights From Multiple Expert Discussions Around The World
15 December 2018

CONTENTS
01 Programme overview
02 Themes and Insights
03 Regional Comparison
04 Emerging Questions

01 PROGRAMME OVERVIEW

Future of Digital Identity - Programme Overview
This is an emerging view of the Future of Digital Identity - based on
multiple views collected during a 2018 Open Foresight programme
made possible by the generous sponsorship of Mastercard.
3 | Analysis and synthesis
• Identification of cross-
cutting themes and areas
of greatest impact over
the next ten years
2 | Exploration and iteration
• Expert workshops
• Regional perspectives
• Addition of new insights
through collaborative dialogue
1 | initial perspective
• Synthesis of existing Future
Agenda insights
• Interviews and desk research
• Meaningful baseline for
discussion
Emerging view
of the next ten
years
01
02
03

Workshops in 5 Countries Across 4 Continents
The programme has accessed more than 140 informed experts with
discussion focused on the key shifts and drivers most likely to have
an impact on the Future of Digital Identity, over the next decade.
San Francisco
London
Singapore
Sydney
Brussels

Corporates
Technology
Firms
Government
Regulators,
NGOs
Academia,
Research,
Consulting
Start-Ups
Influencers &
Associations
Diverse, Informed Expert Perspective
This Open Foresight programme has brought together under the
Chatham House Rule, a wide range of participants with varied perspectives
to help build a richer view of implications, risks and opportunities.

02 THEMES AND INSIGHTS

Thematic Lens
Many of the insights generated have significant areas of overlap, both practical
and theoretical. Their implications for DI stakeholders, and the ‘DI story’,
become clearer when a cross-cutting thematic lens is applied.
Communicating Identity
System Design
Empowering the Individual
Unintended Consequences
Growing the
Standards
Ethics by
Design
Building Blocks
Still Matter
System
Vulnerabilities
Digital Identity
Victims
Digital Rights
The Inclusion
Illusion
Re-assessing
Self
Sovereignty
Power and
Influence
Ecosystem
Development
Social
Identities
Multiple
Bets
Its Social
not
Technical
Digital Life
Rituals

Communicating Identity
Digital Identity is a nebulous term that covers multiple technologies and
digital and social interactions and transactions. Clarity around purpose,
language, need, value and application is needed.
• Digital Identity Literacy
• Attributes Not Digital ID
• Data IP Attribution
• Proxy Digital IDs
• Data Provenance
• Secure Access Without Disclosure
• Cost Reduction
• Convenience Rules
• Value Not Identity

Digital Identity Literacy
A wholesale move toward Digital ID will require it’s own programme of
education to teach people how to maintain and keep safe their Digital ID.

Attributes not Digital ID
Users give permission for a third party to access the appropriate attribute
mix required to complete a given exchange. ID may/may not feature.

Data IP Attribution
Digital IDs enable the tracing of contribution of individual ‘chunks’ of data
to data-driven services, allowing for all contributors to be recompensed.

Proxy Digital IDs
As the pool of Personally Identifiable Information continues to grow, the
need for Digital Identity reduces. Algorithms win the race for identity.

Data Provenance
Digital ID enables provenance of all ‘owned data’ including data provided
by, say, passive sensors in cars, much of which may not be personal at all.

Secure Access without Disclosure
Driven by increased consumer awareness of continuing misuse,
transacting while giving minimal (or no) information gains momentum.

Cost Reduction
Digital ID enables service providers to reduce their transaction costs and
accelerate the pace of innovation, both for them and for wider society.

Convenience Rules
Continuing consumer appetite for convenience drives development of Digital
ID, especially as many processes requiring formal ID feel so old-fashioned today.

Value, not Identity
Consumers are only motivated to adopt Digital Identity through compelling
use cases that deliver tangible value to them (e.g. time or cost saving).

Power and Influence
As Digital Identity systems and networks emerge,
power and influence will come to rest in
different locations depending on different models.
• Centralised or Distributed Digital Identity Systems?
• Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers
• Expanding Roles
• Digital ID Platforms
• Digital ID Federations
• Influence of Scale
• Aussie Rules

Centralised or Distributed Digital Identity Systems?
Distributed implementation removes concerns of trust in single entities.
Centralised systems bring uptake and interoperability. Nation states decide.

Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers
Highly centralised Digital ID systems, provide potential for identity ‘keepers’
to hold vast amounts of user data across myriad different contexts.

Expanding Roles
Roles/responsibilities in Digital ID systems grow from today’s verifiers and
trust partners to legal guardians, delegated authorities, AI brokers, etc.

Digital ID Platforms
Brokers emerge to help individuals easily manage their use of
multiple ID’s, profiles and attributes across different contexts.

Digital ID Federations
As with airline alliances (e.g. Star Alliance), Digital ID Federations form
linking together Attribute Suppliers and different Digital ID Providers.

Influence of Scale
China’s super apps and India Stack are already expanding into, and
influencing, other geographies. Digital ID tech will ‘follow the money’.

Aussie Rules
Learning from mistakes of others, and positioning itself as a leader in terms
of cross-sector cooperation, Australia sets western Digital ID benchmarks.

Multiple Bets
Different players in the Digital ID space come with differing
priorities, visions and business models, each with different
implications for future opportunities and markets.
• New Digital ID Markets
• Expanding Digital Service Provision
• Data-less Business Models
• Blueprint for Success
• Many Internets
• IoT Leads IoP

New Digital ID markets
Digital ID has the potential to play a critical role in social and economic life.
A new range of economic opportunities and markets will emerge around it.

Expanding Digital Service Provision
With growing numbers of digital delivered services, Digital ID will enable
an expansion of access to different, and new kinds, of service providers.

Data-less Business Models
Innovations allow users to give access to data without sharing it.
New models centre on positive, privacy-preserving, consumer propositions.

Blueprint for Success
Global financial transactions and payments infrastructures will provide
us with the ‘blueprint’ for building a truly interoperable Digital ID system.

Many Internets
Lacking a single global solution, the internet splits into different realms: e.g.
Open-Internet, Dark Internet and Internet Islands (local Digital ID systems).

IoT Leads IoP
Commercial use cases for ‘things’ creates identity and attribute frameworks
and infrastructure for objects. These are then applied to people.

Growing Standards
Digital Identity standards will begin to
emerge, with pace-setters reaping early benefits.
But with first-mover advantage will come responsibility and accountability.
• Implementation Matters
• Setting the Standards
• Digital ID Accountability
• Regulations on the Fly

Implementation Matters
Poor implementations will lead to massive data breaches, damaging faith
in Digital ID service providers, or even the Digital ID concept as a whole.

Setting the Standards
First-movers will develop standards for basis of global Digital ID systems.
Consumers and governments decide the winners (e.g. Betamax vs VHS).

Digital ID Accountability
Clear accountability and good data stewardship is seen as key. Strong
punishment emerges in response to Digital ID misuse and reputation damage.

Regulation on the Fly
Digital ID will land and expand very quickly. Regulators will be
faced with the task of ‘building the aeroplane whilst flying it’.

Integrating Ethics
The field of Digital Identity is nascent enough that building truly
ethical principles and systems is still possible, helping to
avoid negative unintended consequences.
• Ethics By Design
• Unified Digital ID Ethical Principles
• Hyper Accurate Advertising
• Super-Surveillance
• Social Scoring

Ethics by Design
Sensitivity of Digital ID data, and the potential for catastrophic or malign
mis-use, drives ‘ethical by design’ standards that go beyond compliance.

Unified Digital ID Ethical Principles
Digital ID ethics will follow the bio-ethics lead with foundational principles:
e.g. Beneficence, Non-maleficence, Autonomy and Justice (and Explicability).

Hyper-accurate Advertising
Users practiced in social media’s ‘data for advertising’ model, consent to
sharing their ID for this purpose, resulting in hyper accurate advertising.

Super-surveillance
Digital ID’s highly accurate and relatively clean surveillance data,
will lead to mass surveillance in some states and market economies.

Social Scoring
Digital ID attributes enable monitoring of ‘good behaviour’ e.g. carbon
footprint tracking. In the hands of some, this evolves into social scoring.

The Building Blocks Still Matter
Interoperability is likely to emerge first in regard to authentication
and verification, with interoperability around identity
attributes lagging behind and influenced by it.
• Something Owned, Something Known, Something You
• New Bio-Metric Fingerprints
• Trust Cocktails
• Robust Authentication Equals Trust

Something Owned, Something Known, Something You
Authentication typically features something you own, you know and you are.
Innovating unique identifiers leads to new ways of thinking about who we are.

New Biometric Fingerprints
New identity markers, including our ‘routines’, prove useful in detecting
fraud, especially where AI sees changes in behavioural patterns.

Trust Cocktails
As ‘things’ are given Digital IDs, people are no longer certain of who or what
they are trusting - app, service, device or person - or if they should care.

Robust Authentication Equals Trust
Strong authentication processes will be the key factor in determining overall
levels of trust in the reliability and security of a given Digital ID system.

Digital Rights
Digital Identity rights could become fundamental human rights.
DI implementations could also become the means by
which we exercise wider emerging data rights.
• Digital Rights Management
• Transparent Exchange
• Assertion of My Digital Rights
• Management of Digital ID rights
• Digital ID as a Fundamental Human Right
• The Un-Digital

Digital Rights Management
Digital ID provides the vehicle for managing digital rights – when to be
anonymous, when to be seen, when its ok to be monitored, etc.

Transparent Exchange
Digital ID drives transparency in the value exchange between consumers
and services, curtailing current ’surveillance capitalism’ business models.

Assertion of My Digital Rights
A DI Bill of Rights is already demanded by many. How this is built, by who,
what it includes, and critically, how it is enforced, will be hotly contested.

Management of Digital ID Rights
As Digital ID becomes part of society’s critical infrastructure, rules emerge
on how access rights can be given, taken away, redressed and restored.

Digital ID as a Fundamental Human Right
Digital Identity becomes a fundamental human right. Governments ensure
both access and equity for all, while business is made to respect this right.
Image courtesy of: Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire

The Un-Digital
With the arrival of Digital ID rights comes the inalienable right to be
non-digital, and the need to serve the ‘Digital Amish’ who choose to opt out.

The Inclusion Illusion
Those needing access to basic services constitute a meaningful audience
for Digital ID, and are likely to be enthusiastic early-adopters, despite
being a non-traditional target for commercial organisations.
• Digital Identity - The First Wave
• Stateless Netizens
• Digital Citizenship
• The Case For Digital Inclusion

Digital Identity - The First Wave
Early adopters will include those who need to become familiar with
Digital ID in order to access basic (digitally adapting) government services.

Stateless Netizens
Digital ID for some (e.g. displaced peoples) becomes more important than
citizenship, leading to societal groups based on new, shared attributes.

Digital Citizenship
Digital IDs issued at birth and/or multi-lateral and global bodies issuing
and protecting Digital ID, gives greater meaning and usefulness to them.

The Case for Digital Inclusion
Digital ID systems will go some way towards addressing access and
exclusion issues of the 1 billion+ people lacking legal identity documents.

Re-Assessing Self-Sovereignty
The data-driven world has already led to a loss of individual agency.
The advent of AI may accelerate this trend. Digital Identity could
help us to re-assert our sovereignty and agency in a data-driven world.
• Me, Myself and I
• Erosion of Agency
• Personalised Controlled Exchanges
• Self-Sovereign ID
• Personal Gatekeeping
• Balanced Proof of Identification
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs
• Verified but Incognito

Me, Myself and I
Digital ID users maintain deliberately separated identities and attribute
stores. Providers offer context-based, Digital-ID-as-a-service solutions.

Erosion of Agency
Consumer comfort in outsourcing agency to ‘things’ drives a rich market
of data driven technology deciding for us. Erosion of human agency results.

Personalised, Controlled Exchanges
Digital ID gives people greater control over access to their personal data,
and encourages transparency of service-providers in onward use.

Self-sovereign ID
Calls for self-sovereign digital ID - or the ‘controlled sharing’ principles
on which it is based - are likely to increase, as are attempts to build it.

Personal Gatekeeping
Consent management systems and platforms emerge to help individuals
more easily ‘trust in an otherwise trustless system (of machines)’.

Balanced Proof of Identification
Digital users become more demanding about ensuring they ‘get as well as they
give’ with regard to verification of those whom they choose to engage.

Zero Knowledge Proofs
Future Digital Identities will include attributes that are harder to mimic or steal.
Authentication will occur without data exchange, limiting the data at risk.

Verified but Incognito
For more private contexts and use-cases, properly authenticated, but wholly
anonymous identities are deployed within the Digital ID eco-system.

It's Social Not Technical
Digital Identity is largely seen as a technical challenge, but ID
and Identity are about social relationships and will thus
bring attendant complexities into their digital realisation.
• Local Digital Citizenship
• Merging of Identity and ID
• From Tech to Society
• Digital ID as Belonging

Local Digital Citizenship
Distrust of surveillance and distant institutions leads to hyper-local identity
and authentication by the people we know and communities we live in.

Merging of Identity and ID
As ID management and attribute systems collect more detailed digital user
histories, our Identity and ID will merge, with unknowable consequences.

From Tech to Society
Today Digital ID is a tech challenge. Pressure increases for it to be managed
as a social challenge with tech held accountable for decisions made today.

Digital ID as Belonging
Just as individuals identify with others (e.g. location, faith, custom) in society,
so it is in the digital space. Cultural and social sensitivities remain key.

Digital Life Rituals/Stages
Digital Identity creators will need to think hard about the
full life-cycle of a digital identity and how it will incorporate
the changes, life-stages and rituals of human life-cycles.
• Right to be Forgotten • Immortal ID

Right to be Forgotten
The right to be forgotten is increasingly recognised in a world with digital
memories. Implementation in Digital ID eco-systems is a significant challenge.

Immortal ID
Immortal IDs form - the sum of our digital histories and a collection of all
digital attributes. But who owns and controls them? Under what consent?

System Vulnerabilities
Digital Identity systems are potentially both a solution, and
a new frontline, in the battle for cyber security. They could re-define
and re-shape approaches to cyber risk, defense and attack.
• Re-evaluation of Cyber Risk
• Enhanced Cyber-Security
• Avoiding Honeypots
• The Big Fake
• Null Attributes

Enhanced Cyber Security
Strong and secure systems of digital identification will play a significant
role in enhancing cyber security for individuals, organisations and states.

Avoiding Honeypots
The need for cyber protection ensures that distributed data models prevail
over those that seek centralization, except in authoritarian regimes.

Re-evaluation of Cyber-risk
Breaches to digital ID systems have the potential to cause catastrophic damage.
Organisations will radically re-evaluate their investment to mitigate it.

The Big Fake
Fake Digital IDs, unlike fake passports, have the potential to be used in
many contexts at the same time, scaling up the consequences involved.

Null-attributes
Identity attributes, currently understood as unique (e.g. fingerprint)
become unusable or ‘null’ as they are exposed in continued breaches.

Digital Identity Victims
History teaches us that formalising identity can lead to great atrocities
and countless victims. The data and applications associated with
Digital Identity carry high risk for individuals, states and societies.
• Competing Interest Areas
• Identity Victims
• Offsetting Unintended Consequences
• Benefits of Catastrophe
• The Cost of Convenience
• Increased Accountability
Removed Honeypots – as also in
System Vulnerabilities sections –
presume we want to d-dupe

Competing Interest Areas
A battle for ‘ownership’ of the identity space grows, highlighting ideologies:
e.g. social good, economic opportunity, privacy, national security, social order.

Identity Victims
History is littered with horrific examples of the consequences of formally
assigning identity markers (race, religion etc.). Digital ID will be no different.

Offsetting Unintended Consequences
Specialist thinking emerges, particularly sociological, around the potential
unintended consequences of rapid deployment and adoption of Digital ID.

Benefits of Catastrophe
Digital ID catastrophe is almost inevitable, but will be a stimulus to drive
positive changes in awareness of secure identity and authentication.

The Cost of Convenience
Convenience remains as a core driver, but with the cost of teaching poor
behaviours, e.g., learning laziness, path of least resistance, etc.

Increased Accountability
Digital ID increases accountability in public online spaces, where
online behaviours can be traced back to offline identities.

03 REGIONAL COMPARISON

Regional Comparison – Top 5
The chart shows those insights which featured in the ‘top 5’
according to relative impact on Digital ID over the next
ten years, in at least one of the workshops.
San Francisco
• Null Attributes
• Me, Myself and I
• Verified But Incognito
• Super-Surveillance
• Digital ID Accountability
Sydney
• Management of Digital ID
Rights
• Super-Surveillance
• Digital ID Accountability
• The Big Fake
• The Case for Digital Inclusion
London
• Personalised Controlled Exchanges
• Stateless Netizens
• The Big Fake
• Convenience Rules
• The Case For Digital Inclusion
Brussels
• Social Scoring
• Ethics By Design
• Influence of Scale
• Personalised Controlled Exchanges
• The Case for Digital Inclusion
Singapore
• Setting the Standards
• Enhanced Cyber-Security
• Robust Authentication Equals Trust
• Convenience Rules
• The Case for Digital Inclusion

Regional Comparison - Detail
The chart shows how the top 15 programme insights were ‘scored’ according
to relative impact over the next ten years, in different workshops.
NB. not all insights were shown in each workshop.
Insight London Singapore Sydney San Francisco Brussels Average No of Workshops
Digital ID Accountability 13 15 15 14.44 3
Verified but Incognito 13 11 15 13.19 3
Social Scoring 13 14 13.13 2
The Case for Digital Inclusion 15 13 14 8 15 12.92 5
Management of Digital ID Rights 13 13 13 12.78 3
Influence of Scale 13 13 12.50 2
Proxy Digital IDs 13 12.50 1
The Big Fake 13 13 13 10 12.21 4
Super-surveillance 10 10 15 14 12.19 4
Robust Authentication Equals Trust 12 15 9 13 12.06 4
Expanding Roles 13 10 13 11.94 3
Enhanced Cyber Security 10 15 10 11.67 3
Stateless Netizens 13 10 13 10 13 11.60 5
Trust Cocktails 13 11 13 9 11.46 4
Convenience Rules 14 10 9 13 11.31 4

04 EMERGING QUESTIONS

What Do You Think?
As an open foresight programme we would welcome your thoughts to help
build a stronger perspective. What do you agree or disagree with, what is
missing and what will be the key impacts and implications? Thank you.

Some Key Questions for Digital ID Eco-system Organisations
What identity / data is real?
Whose identity attributes can I trust?
What role do we wish to play in the identity ecosystem?
How does personal data mesh with machine data?
What is our ethical position regarding digital identity?

Some Key Questions for Industry
In a world of D-ID, will customers still want to share data with us?
How will we ensure that we are ‘trustworthy’?
What data do we need collect in the future?
How will we be able to comply when customers assert digital rights?
Can we develop new, privacy-preserving customer propositions?

Some Key Questions for Individuals and Society
How can my personal digital information facilitate my life?
How will I manage my digital attributes?
Who do I trust to help me do this?
Do I want my personal data to help society?
What are my digital rights and how who protects them?

Some Key Questions for Regulators and Government
What kind of identity ecosystem do we wish to support?
What role will Government data about individuals play?
How can we ensure that digital identity benefits society?
How do we ensure that no citizen is excluded?
What steps must we take to prevent unintended consequences?

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