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Segment-specific forecasts including:
Civic identity apps
Digital identity cards
Third party identity apps
Mobile identity installed base, usage and revenue
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‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West
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The coronavirus pandemic is leading to a new phenomenon: a migration to “gateway communities,” or small towns near major public lands and ski resorts as people’s jobs increasingly become remote-friendly. This is straining the towns’ resources and putting pressure on them to adapt.
A new paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association shows that populations in these communities were already growing before COVID-19 hit, leading to some problems traditionally thought of as urban issues, like lack of affordable housing, availability of public transit, congestion, and income inequality.
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Bitcoin Has Lost Steam. But Criminals Still Love It. – The New York Times
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The amount of cryptocurrency spent on so-called dark net markets, where stolen credit card information and a wide array of illegal drugs can be purchased with Bitcoin, rose 60 percent to reach a new high of $601 million in the last three months of 2019, according to data released Tuesday by Chainalysis,
From Bitcoin Has Lost Steam. But Criminals Still Love It. – The New York Times:
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How to Prevent Social Media’s Editorial Role From Becoming Censorship of Speech — The Information
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But trusted, irrevocable, unfalsifiable, distributed digital identity is the only path forward that doesn’t create massive risk for society in the long term.
From How to Prevent Social Media’s Editorial Role From Becoming Censorship of Speech — The Information.
This is the reputation economy of the future.
How to Prevent Social Media’s Editorial Role From Becoming Censorship of Speech — The Information
How to Prevent Social Media’s Editorial Role From Becoming Censorship of Speech — The Information:
The only true technological answer is to couple encryption with decentralization (which of course touches on the crypto world). This is a critical direction for those who value free speech.
The problem with all this privacy tech is that it is less convenient for users, harder to build and less profitable than more centralized messaging solutions.
Encrypting systems limits the functionality your services can offer for core messaging, because diistributed systems are fundamentally more expensive and slower than their centralized kin.
This reality is going to be hard to overcome, and it’s why private messaging is in such a precarious position.
Privacy and freedom are in a sense a public good facing a tragedy of the commons. And if privacy-rich distributed systems are only used for questionable or challenging material, they will be large targets for disruption.
I am not sure there is a way around this problem. I don’t think the market will move toward privacy-rich technology. Nonetheless, I very much hope those who are committed to privacy continue to push in this direction.
Evolve the Cultural Expectations Around Truth and Develop Strong Forms of Trusted Digital Identity
We live in a moment of crisis when it comes to truth. Up to now, humanity has enjoyed a long period where hard-to-fake recorded media (audio, photos, video) has allowed truth to come from almost anywhere.
This is not the future.
In the big picture, with the rise of increasingly convincing deepfakes and the ability for anyone to manipulate media or create fantasy that is as believable as reality, the future of truth has to be based on networks of trust.
While we are having trouble digesting this reality as a culture, the default assumption has to be that information is adversarial. We have to learn to function well in an environment where by default you don’t trust anything, but you build a network of trusted sources over your lifetime.
What this means is that people and brands can build trusted identities over the long term, as well as networks they can rely upon to understand reality and make decisions.
CHYP No scary systems
At the (sadly, virtual) Fintech South event the year, I was asked to chair a discussion on identity and privacy with three extremely well-qualified experts who had informed perspectives on the state of, and trends in, those important pillars of a digital society. These were Adam Gunther (SVP, Digital Identity for Equifax), Andrew Gowasack (Co-Founder and President at TrustStamp) and Megan Heinze (President, Financial Institutions, North America for IDEMIA). It was great to talk to a group of people who were not only well-informed on these topics but had some passion for them too.
I won’t go over everything that was discussed, but I do want to pick up on a comment that was made in passing when I was chatting to the panelists: someone said that a guiding principle should be “no scary systems”. Hear hear! But what is a scary system? It is, in my opinion, a system that privileges security over privacy. This is not how we should be designing the identity systems for the 21st century!
It is well-understood that there is a fundamental asymmetry between privacy and security when it comes to providing products and services. You can have security without privacy, but it doesn’t work the other way round. You can’t have privacy without security. If you can’t keep your data secure then it doesn’t matter what any of your privacy goals or policies are, because none of the data will be private for long. Therefore, we all (by which I mean the public, organisations, governments and law enforcement agencies and so on) all want a secure infrastructure. Not all of the stakeholders, however, want a private infrastructure! There are a great many people who have very good reasons for wanting to have access to data. The police, to choose an obvious example, might want access to phone messages. It is a topic of some complexity, and well beyond the bounds of our panel, to discuss under what circumstances or by what mechanisms they might obtain those messages but I think we can all agree that the messages should be secure to the extent compatible with a democratic society.
No scary systems! No digital identity infrastructure should involve any sort of trade-off between privacy and security: we (ie, the industry) should be perfectly capable of delivering both. This why I found the discussion with leading organisations in the field so interesting: we all agreed from our different perspectives that this is a reasonable goal. And we know how to do it. Designing an identity infrastructure that is founded on credentials rather than identity (what some people refer to a reputation economy) is not only feasible but highly desirable.
Suppose that the vision for national identity (based on the concepts of social graph, mobile authentication, pseudonyms and so on) focused on the entitlements rather than on either the transport mechanism or biographical details? Then, as a user of the scheme, I might have an entitlement to (for example) access health care, enter a bar or read to the Wall Street Journal online. I might have these entitlements on my phone (so that’s the overwhelming majority of the population taken care of) or stored somewhere safe (eg, in my bank) or out on a blockchain somewhere. Remember, these entitlements would attest to my ability to do something: they would prove that I am entitled to do something (see a doctor, drink in the pub, read about people who a richer than me), not who I am. They are about entitlement, not identity as a proxy for entitlement.
Margaret knows how to secure the cryptographic keys needed to make this all work, Adam knows how to attach reputations to them and Andrew knows how to authenticate their use. So I was very happy to take part in a discussion that gave the audience (and me) a good dose of optimism about where we might go next with digital identity.
‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West
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The coronavirus pandemic is leading to a new phenomenon: a migration to “gateway communities,” or small towns near major public lands and ski resorts as people’s jobs increasingly become remote-friendly. This is straining the towns’ resources and putting pressure on them to adapt.
A new paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association shows that populations in these communities were already growing before COVID-19 hit, leading to some problems traditionally thought of as urban issues, like lack of affordable housing, availability of public transit, congestion, and income inequality.
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The Truth About Bitcoin: People Aren’t Using It As Currency – Decrypt
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Bitcoin was originally billed as “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” but most cryptocurrencies aren’t used for payments.
Surveys have shown that the majority of Bitcoin is held for speculative purposes.
While some retailers accept Bitcoin, purchases have suffered from higher drop-out rates than cards and cash payments.From The Truth About Bitcoin: People Aren’t Using It As Currency – Decrypt:
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TD Bank accuses Plaid of duping customers by ripping off its trademarks
TD bank has filed a lawsuit against Plaid
“In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers’ bank records for valuable data (e.g., transaction histories, loans, etc.), which the defendant monetises by selling to third parties,”
From TD Bank accuses Plaid of duping customers by ripping off its trademarks:
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This is why banks prefer an API-based interface.
Open Banking: 7 Ways Data-Sharing Can Advance Financial Inclusion
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If open banking regimes expand to include telecommunications, social media or other types of data, then SIM card registration or other methods of CDD could come into play as long as simplified know-your-customer (KYC) approach is allowed.
From Open Banking: 7 Ways Data-Sharing Can Advance Financial Inclusion:
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Snippings 