🏁Ongoing efforts

This topic covers the major efforts going on in the identity industry, and tries to cleanly differentiate between their areas of focus including use cases, harm cases (vulnerability and attack vectors), world views, motivations, and underlying technology assumptions.

Web 3.0

DID

The decentralized identity standards and ecosystem built on top of Decentralized Identifiers (DID) and related standards.

W3C standardization

• DID core spec recommendation

• Verifiable credentials spec recommendation

• JSON-LD spec recommendation

• Credentials community

DIF

• Decentralized identity foundation

• Identity discovery (DID)

• Claims and credentials (VC)

Misc

• Web of trust reboot using DID/VC

• Privacy by design - Discussion paper - Danish Ministry of Science

• Proposed VC flavors in Healthcare

• CitizenKey - Focus on security and privacy, with goals of full digital privacy, using technologies such as zero knowledge cryptography, hardware security, and avoidance of correlatable identity roots at all layers.

Ethereum identity

Semaphore

Semaphore is an effort using Zero Knowledge (ZK) technology to enable fully anonymous identity interactions with the public blockchain in the context of community activity such as "private voting, whistle-blowing, mixers, and anonymous authentication". Here's Vitalik's recent proposal that offers to extend the concept into fully anonymous decentralized reputation.

Privacy by design

A general effort has been forming as a push back to big tech's recent privacy abuses, primarily lead by nations other than the United States. Here are its foundational principles. Legally, it advocates for holding responsible tech companies that handle user personal data for mishandling and abuses. Technically, it advocates for engineering systems that default to high privacy, and minimize the chances of persona data exposure outside of the user's expressed permissions.