Re: Oracles as Issuers

On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 00:35, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:

> During today's CCG call we discussed ways that an institution would make
> public assertions about their practices. The assertions could be:
> - policies, commitments, or audits that are associated with the
> institution in general, or
> - certifications, badges, or licenses associated with specific individuals.
>
> Either way, the assertions are typically public such as state medical
> licenses, federal DEA numbers, voter rolls, real estate, food and liquor
> licenses, law enforcement, license plates, D&B reports, court filings, sex
> offenders, white and yellow pages, etc. Access to these assertions was
> seldom limited before networking because there was sufficient friction to
> keep all but the most dedicated data brokers at bay. The friction also
> drove a business model around sale of this public information.
>
> These public assertions are now the feedstock for thousands of data
> brokers operating as a broad surveillance mechanism, privatized, and
> without much transparency or regulation.
>
> I call these public assertion issuers oracles because it matches how the
> term is used in smart contracts.
>
> An oracle's public assertions can be open, behind a paywall, or restricted
> access. In the case of pay or access restrictions, the reason typically has
> nothing to do with the consent of the data subject. The restriction is
> based on the credentials of the requesting party such as law enforcement
> access to auto registry information or a no-fly list. Data brokers consume
> assertions from other oracles and act as oracles themselves, typically
> without the consent of the data subject.
>
> Because consent does not figure into the practices of most oracles, be
> they public or private, the only reason to introduce a holder and their
> wallet is to avoid loss of privacy through traffic analysis. That's an
> important feature but there are many situations where the data subject
> really has no worries about the oracle knowing who the verifiers are.
> Oracles can, by policy, choose to erase access logs after 24 hours. The
> assertions are often subject to revocation and having the verifier contact
> the oracle directly is more efficient than dead-drops.
>
> In most any case, the data subject can always choose to make a copy of the
> assertion by the oracle in the form of a verifiable credential.
>
> My point is that oracles could be using VCs regardless of what assertions
> they're making or whether the VC is going to a holder or a verifier. The
> only difference is whether the request is made by the data subject
> themselves (to go to their wallet) or by a verifier directly. Payment and
> revocation would need to be considered, of course. Some oracles would need
> to process requests as discussed in
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2020May/0049.html
> using protocols like GNAP
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-richer-transactional-authz-09.
>
> Oracles as Issuers has protocol implications for both access control and
> transport. How should we continue this discussion?
>

Very much agree that verifiable claims can be used as oracles

That's how you tie together block chain crypto and the web, in order to
make things scale to millions of participants

>
>
> - Adrian
>