Re: Call for Focal DID Use Cases

On Tue, 2018-06-05 at 17:57 +0000, Christoph Dorn wrote:
> I have serious concerns that DIDs will be used to bring online, in a 
> central/correlating fashion, what was in the past spread around many 
> parties which by law or inconvenience could not correlate/share 
> information.

These are valid concerns and i'm glad that you are raising them.

A possible mitigation is that an individual can choose to have multiple
sets of identifiers and multiple third-party repositories as well as
self-held identifiers. The same applies to Verifiable Credentials.

> I find that this group is skewed towards technology for government
> and big business (understandably so since it is a W3C group)

One of the unusual aspects of W3C is that individuals can have as loud
a voice in most respects as governments and large companies. 

> I have decided not to contribute individual-empowering use-cases as
> I 
> think the problem does not lie with DIDs but how they are leveraged
> by 
> authorities and corporations which is completely out of our hands. I 
> feel like this group is the wrong venue to discuss the layers of 
> abstraction that need to be built on top of DIDs to realize self 
> sovereign identity as it is not purely a technical problem. I don't 
> know if there is a venue for such discussions and if such a venue
> can 
> actually effectively affect anything.

I think you *should*, if you are willing, contribute them.

We don't do enough at W3C to discuss, think about, encourage discussion
of wider implications of the technologies we crare, nor contextualize
them socially. That we could do more doesn't mean we should do nothing.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG
Improving Web Advertising: https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/
Personal: Web-slave for https://www.FromOldBooks.Org/

Received on Tuesday, 5 June 2018 21:14:01 UTC