Re: Principles of Identity in Web Architecture

Jay Graber’s ‘blob’ for Bluesky collates digital concepts and protocols
that are ‘digital identity’ related. She adopts a definition that is
somewhat reflexive — an identity is something that has a digital identity.

I appreciate of course that her doc is more a page of notes than a
meticulous report, and I always enjoy reading what Jay has to say, but I
raise the point to try and underline my previous observations here.

Digital technologists (speaking in general, not about Jay or anyone here)
have a history of fitting the human to the code, of striving to fit human
community to IT schema. But the world does not work like this. Human
identity does not work like this.

The W3C's design principles <https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission>
recognise that the web exists for people, and not the other way around. If
the TAG is to make an original contribution in the context of the digital
mediation and augmentation of human identity then it should bring this lens
to the party imho. If more of us do not, then the code will suffocate.

In that light, and on the basis that I can’t help it seems but share links
in this thread, this report by the Omidyar Network and Caribou Digital is
time well spent ... Identities: New Practices in a Connected Age
<https://www.identitiesproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Identities-Report.pdf>.



On Thu, 17 Jun 2021 at 12:28, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 21:19, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 6/16/21 2:44 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 14 Jun 2021 at 03:41, Patrick J. Hayes <phayes@ihmc.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 6, 2021, at 8:50 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 at 14:02, Philip Sheldrake <philip@eulerpartners.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> ….
>>>>
>>>
>>>> It is reassuring to see you distinguish “identity” and identifiers in
>>>> the context of humans, but your email here indicates to me that you still
>>>> consider Alice to have just the one identity. This aligns of course with
>>>> the comparatively recent (centuries) bureaucratisation of identity, aka
>>>> legal identity, and the imperative for Sybil resistance in democratic,
>>>> taxation, and wealth distribution contexts, but I have yet to find another
>>>> discipline beyond law and information technology conceiving identity as
>>>> either singular or enduring. Quite the opposite.
>>>>
>>>
>>> You raise a good point.  Alice can have many identities.  …
>>>
>>>
>>> Ahem. Allow me to call BS at this point. Alice does not have many
>>> identities. LIke everyone else who has ever drawn breath, and indeed like
>>> every endurant object, Alice has one identity. She has it, uniquely and
>>> irrevocably, from the moment she was born, to the end of her life. She is
>>> one person.
>>>
>>> I understand what Philip is saying here, but he wildly overstates his
>>> point. In his minority opinion chapter for the SSI book he starts by
>>> talking about players in Monopoly being represented by the board pieces,
>>> then in a few sentences segued all the way to:  " Intuitively following
>>> some self-reflection, we all know that we have different identities, call
>>> them personae if you like, or avatars, that we adopt in different
>>> contexts.", then after reminding us that "All the worlds a stage." he goes
>>> on to "I referred to this earlier in the context of ‘being’ different
>>> across different social media in different contexts, and constantly
>>> revising those identities based on the corresponding contextual
>>> relationships and interactions. Consider your professional avatar, your
>>> parental avatar, your spousal avatar, your student avatar, etc. Overlapping
>>> and interacting in some respects no doubt, but always evolving and always
>>> contextual." And he sums up: "Your ‘you’ in the performance review
>>> meeting at work differs to your ‘you’ on your wedding day. Your avatars at
>>> age 35 will differ from those age 25, or indeed from those age 34. Or 34½.
>>> Or yesterday. Psychologists and sociologists understand all this well."
>>>
>>> Psychologists and sociologists here, of course, as contrasted with
>>> unimaginative computer nerds. But also as opposed to clear-thinking
>>> philosophers.
>>>
>>> Philip in his email response is careful to use scare quotes, speaking of
>>> "identities" rather than identities. He also refers to personae and
>>> avatars. Fine, no doubt we all can have many of these things that
>>> sociologists study, and they are of course contextual and perhaps (though I
>>> would dispute with him on this) highly transient and flexible. But these
>>> things, whatever they are, are not identities. They are not what is talked
>>> about when people use owl:sameAs, or what we mean when we say that a
>>> supreme court judge, a cancer patient, a tennis player and a worshipper in
>>> the Episcopal Church are all the SAME person. These "identities", pieces on
>>> some super-Monopoly game, avatars of ourselves in social games, are not
>>> distinct human entities. If the cancer patient dies, so do the SCOTUS
>>> justice and the tennis player. If the tennis player is tried for fraud or
>>> theft, so is the SCOTUS judge. Identity means /being the same thing/, or in
>>> this more limited sense /being the same person/, and sameness of personhood
>>> is something far more fundamental, and in the end far simpler, than these
>>> social avatars/projections/roles that Philip is talking about. It means
>>> simply being the same person. In a legal sense to be sure but also in a
>>> biological, personal-identity, continuity of memory, continuity of physical
>>> identity sense. And, I claim, in an ordinary everyday common sense.
>>> Alice is Alice, all one of her. She is herself, and nobody else.
>>>
>>
>> So perhaps it could be beneficial to separate the digital world and the
>> human world, here
>>
>> Alice could have many digital identities (one for social nets, one for
>> microblogging etc.) and one physical or legal identity
>>
>> The way that the web has evolved, is that these digital identities
>> largely operate in silos, even when the stated goal is interoperability
>>
>> The aim of raising this architectural point is to try and make it easier
>> for different systems to interoperate, and benefit from unexpected reuse.
>> Many systems want to do this, but seemingly dont know how to
>>
>> I know with identity, you can always say, "its complicated", but that
>> doesnt get you too far
>>
>> It would be nice to create a document and say to digital platforms, 'If
>> you follow these points, you're going to be easier to interop with'
>>
>> That could apply to web based systems, P2P, block chain etc. all of which
>> have a notion of identity, albeit, slightly different
>>
>>
>> Hi Melvin,
>>
>> Agreed, with regards to the quest for interoperability.
>>
>> IMHO, It takes us back to the following principles, in the context of
>> apps and services:
>>
>> 1. Identify (or Name) things unambiguously using Identifiers (various
>> schemes based on open standards)
>>
>> 2. Use *Identifiers* as the fulcrum for *Credentials* creation (various
>> document types based on a variety of content-types)
>>
>> 3, Verify Credentials using a variety of Authentication Protocols.
>>
>>
>> Identifier referent reconciliation is ultimately left to logic, to the
>> degree discernible by an app or service, with regards to credentials
>> represented in documents e.g., user profile docs, app profile docs,
>> passports, and others.
>>
>>
>> Referents, Identifiers, Identification (Credentials), Authentication,
>> Authorization, and Storage are all loosely-coupled items that shouldn't be
>> conflated (overtly or covertly).
>>
>
> The beginnings of a comparative analysis of different identity systems was
> created by the BlueSky project
>
>
> https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosystem/-/blob/master/topics/identity.md
>
> One of the goals of this project is to create an identity system that can
> work across the web
>
> So instead of branded silos where everyone says, "use our system" or "use
> our spec", which leads to branded silos and balkanization
>
> A better approach could be "use these architectural principles" and you'll
> be able to interoperate with other systems that do so
>
>
>> --
>> Regards,
>>
>> Kingsley Idehen 
>> Founder & CEO
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