Re: What is a DID? Was: Call for Focal DID Use Cases

During all this conversation about DIDs and use cases, I keep being
reminded of the final comment by Stina of Yubico of the IIW film. (I
directed/produced it, so I have much of the content in my brain thanks to
long nights of editing.) I very consciously chose this comment to end the
documentary.

It starts around 9:00: https://vimeo.com/207961532

It kinda perfectly describes what we are doing here. This was released over
a year ago, and the interviews happened over two years ago... which goes to
show how long we in the community have been hungry for a technological
solution.

-H

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 2:53 PM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com>
wrote:

> (I'm starting this thread because I'm having a hard time following the
> "Focal" DID Use Cases)
>
> A Decentralized IDentifier (DID) is a self-issued IDENTIFIER that is
> globally unique within a governance domain called a Method. A DID is
> self-sovereign if it is not tied to any particular institution,
> jurisdiction, or federation and if the issuer can substitute or choose
> among multiple Methods of governance without loss of control of the DID. An
> IPFS address is an example of a DID.
>
> To be practical, a DID associates three essential components:
> (i) Zero or more public keys to be used for authentication, digital
> signatures, etc...
> (ii) Zero or more service endpoints to receive messages or issue access
> authorization tokens.
> (iii) Zero or more public claims.
>
> A DID that has neither public keys or service endpoints is merely a
> persistent tag with some public claims and with the potential to add public
> keys or service endpoints at some point in the future. From a privacy
> perspective, it is safe to assume that the public claims will be cataloged
> by others and will persist, along with the tag, forever.
>
> DIDs are de-duplicated (unique) within their Method. They are not a
> de-duplicated IDENTITY.  A DID can be associated with a de-duplicated
> identity at any time just as it can be associated with any other claim or
> credential.
>
> As defined above, the privacy footprint of a DID is negligible.
> Self-issuance means that they can be issued at negligible cost. Public keys
> can also be self-issued at negligible cost.  Service endpoints can be
> self-issued to some extent (e.g. .onion and ?maybe? IPv6 addresses) Because
> service endpoints are routable, they do have some privacy footprint and
> this should be considered as part of any use-case.
>
> Adrian
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 5:13 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
>
>> 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/
>>
>>
>
>
> --
>
> Adrian Gropper MD
>
> PROTECT YOUR FUTURE - RESTORE Health Privacy!
> HELP us fight for the right to control personal health data.
> DONATE: https://patientprivacyrights.org/donate-3/
>



-- 
Heather Vescent <http://www.heathervescent.com/>
The Purple Tornado, Inc
~ The Future in Present Tense ~

@heathervescent <https://twitter.com/heathervescent> | Film Futures
<https://vimeo.com/heathervescent> | Medium
<https://medium.com/@heathervescent/> | LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathervescent/> | Future of Security Updates
<https://app.convertkit.com/landing_pages/325779/>