- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:03:23 -0400
- To: public-credentials@w3.org
On 06/14/2016 03:55 AM, james anderson wrote: > yes, why is “self-sovereign” a more appropriate term than > “sovereign”? Background reading on the "self-sovereign" term: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html Over time, we've found that people associate the word "sovereign" with "nation state", which is not what we want. We tested the word "self-sovereign" among ambassadors at the United Nations and one even used the term in a speech they gave. Keep in mind that until that happened, we didn't know if we'd have sovereign nation buy-in for the terminology. These aren't identifiers that nation states have control over, these are identifiers that individual entities have control over. We're also trying to find a word that isn't easily corrupted, like "user-centric" arguably was during the OpenID Connect days. While some claim that OpenID Connect is truly user-centric, many of its criticizers note that Microsoft and Facebook co-opted the term and changed its meaning over time (for reasons left to the imagination). Users have no ultimate power over their identifiers in OpenID-based systems. That's not a slam against OpenID or SAML, it's just a reality of the design choices that were made. Those systems are still broadly deployed and used, even with their arguable shortcomings. Hope that helps explain the careful deliberation around the self-sovereign term. -- manu -- Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny) Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: The Web Browser API Incubation Anti-Pattern http://manu.sporny.org/2016/browser-api-incubation-antipattern/
Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2016 14:03:46 UTC