Is digitizing everything about ourselves on a mass scale one of the last key steps to creating sentient AI? Probably not. Is a market based approach to digital identity instead of a security and privacy based approach going to be the downfall of ID2020, The Alliance, and inevitably, ours? Is having an obsession with blockchain technology at every step always a good thing? Let's take a look.

The Approach

Way back in January 2019, the ID2020 Certification Mark was officially launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The technical advisory committee is made up of some very interesting names that alone should raise suspicion into what ID2020 is really meant to accomplish. The founding partners include Microsoft, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the vaccine alliance Gavi. The goal of ID2020 is to build a new global model for the design, funding, and implementation of digital ID solutions and technologies. The Alliance says that 1 in 7 people globally lack a means to prove their identity, but does building a blockchain based identity database actually fix that problem? The Alliance says that doing digital ID right means protecting civil liberties and putting control over personal data back into the hands of the individual, but is that really what ID2020 is all about? Is this not about having control and leading the market via their "Certification Mark?" In their manifesto, The Alliance says for refugees, the stateless, and other marginalized groups, reliance on national identification systems isn't possible due to things like exclusion, inaccessibility, or risk, but for these people, is a decentralized system secured by cryptography really the answer? Is this type of system the end all for refugees and the like who face exclusion, inaccessibility, or risk?

100,000 Years Of Identification

Proving your identity is no new concept, and can range from verifying personal information with a bank to open a new account, down to wearing certain colors of clothing to identify with a gang. 100,000 years ago in South Africa, Algeria, and Israel, you could identify someone via the beads they wore, and in 2000 BC you could just look at someones tattoos to determine their status, ancestry, or membership of a particular tribe or clan. The idea of a passport wasn't thought of until the year 1414, when King Henry V of England created documents for his citizens who needed to prove their identity when in another country. The first implementation of ink fingerprints and manual signatures was in 1858, when Sir William Herschel used the fingerprints for precise identification on wills and deeds. Pin and number based identification systems started with the Netherlands decentralized personal number system that was replaced by personal ID cards in the 1940s, around which time the US started issuing Social Security number cards. Digital records started to become commonplace when in 1977 the US started to digitize its paper records, which led to smart identity cards that combined citizenship, healthcare, and finances, with the card containing a variety of info including date of birth, and digital signatures to biometric data. In 2004 the US launched the first statewide palm print database used by law enforcement to match unidentified palm prints to the list of known offenders. With technology moving at such a fast pace, we now accurate speech recognition, iris recognition, facial recognition, DNA sequencing, hand geometry, and vascular pattern recognition.

With this large list of tried and true means of identification, why now must an alliance of very powerful companies and corporations come together in an attempt to corral and manage the identities of some 1 billion people around the world? We can already see there is no one size fits all approach.

The Goal

Let's face it, ID2020 was not created to empower people to be identified. They want to empower unidentified people to participate in the modern economy, but Bitcoin, Monero and many other cryptocurrencies are capable of doing just that, without the individual having to provide any identifiable information, thus maintaining a maximum level of personal privacy. They want every citizen to be able to participate as a voter, but a decentralized identification system won't help with that, refining the election and voting process will help with that. Something like a "one face, one vote" system using highly sophisticated facial recognition via artificial intelligence is one way to ensure a fair election process, and in 2020, this type of thing is not, and should not be out of the question. The Alliance says in their manifesto that "the ability to prove one's identity is a fundamental and universal human right," in that case, I say that the ability to conceal ones identity is a fundamental and universal human right, and nobody should be forced to have to verify the entirety of their identity to any state, government, or company, in order to participate in basic services or transact in the modern economy. They want to put control of identity back into the people, yet they want to create a new identification norm that excludes those who do not wish to participate in it. When you are born in the US, your parents don't get to choose whether or not you are assigned a social security number, it's automatic. This number is sought after by scammers and identity thieves, since this number is the key for an individual to be able to participate in the modern economy. Bank accounts, loans, lines of credit, your financial life could be ruined all because some got access to this number assigned to you by the government. What if you were never assigned a number that was essential to verifying your identity, what if your first, middle, last name, and date of birth were not a part of verifying your identity, but instead, your biometric profile was the sole point of identity verification, and your real identity was made up of a combination of your fingerprints, toe prints, and palm prints, which could be verified via a time stamped entry on an immutable blockchain if the individual chooses to share their biometrics for verification purposes. This takes identity verification and personal information storage completely out of the hands of a third party, and places it back into the hands of the parents and eventually the individual.

One thing is for certain, the ID2020 approach is not it.