BTW - If you want to cut to the chase - Identity 2.5 is a great Substack to get your teeth into.
Identity continues to be core thinking in the work I do with people. In particular with a company down here in Aotearoa.
The Founder is a deep thinker - as are his communications. One of my jobs is to take those thoughts and write words that ordinary people might understand.
In the ‘biz’, it’s a different challenge. Like any other ‘biz’, there are words and phrases that get used and we all think we understand them. But do we? Particularly when you are trying to reset thinking. Even a little bit. Why? Because specific words have specific meanings in certain contexts and ‘the experts will hear th word and some they know what comes next.
Therefore you have to be careful when you use them. BUT, if you don’t use them, you find yourself having to keep redefining things so you don’t lose the frame of reference!
That’s the hard part, but now lets get back to the plot.
Last week I needed a ‘twofer’.
I needed to summarize the essence of what we are talking about in ‘*everyday English’. I knew the recipients were on the ‘fringe’ of the biz, so they had an understanding of ‘identity’, but our pitch was to have them look at identity in a different way. Plain English needed but reset required.
When he saw my email he wrote;
“I like the Johnising of Alan.”
… which I am taking positively and assuming I am not too off beam - recording for posterity - with a few tweaks to protect privacy.
My take on Alan’s thesis
Identity is about people - ordinary people - not devices, not technology … people.
AND
People necessarily have to deal with businesses in three main contexts
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In person
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On the phone
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Online
AND
A lot of identity processes are really kluges that get bypassed all the time. (Personal experience just last month with a bank where I had to prove who I was - and every single proof that they needed I failed - since I had been out of the country and all the ‘check points’ had changed. It took me about 15 minutes together my access back - and I know I legally failed.)
Think of it as ‘theater’. Like taking your shoes off at the airport.
AND
There is no single safe mechanism that allows for all three contexts. In fact some things you need to do just cannot be done in certain contexts.
AND
The tech industry’ is mainly working on ‘number 3’. (Even though numbers 1 and 2 will not be going away. They are mainly being ignored because I suspect that the tech industry really thinks about ‘tech’ and seems to exclude ‘people’ and ‘place’. You only have to recognize that if you have someone’s device, then to all intent and purposes, you can assume their identity and place … who needs ‘place’ - we are all in one place. It’s called the internet!
OK - I am being a little unfair - but you know what I mean. Right?
AND
They are often only working on two party authentication - I am me - here is my proof that I am me - and you will believe me on providing that proof to you.
AND
The complexity, problems and potential losses are exponential when you consider three party authorization … i.e. I (party a) have an account with a business (party b) that grants me a discount at another business (party c). How do you make that work efficiently - across all three contexts?
Meanwhile
Clear use cases include KYC (Know Your Customer) .. a global process that is increasingly necessary as part of more and more laws - to ‘protect’ us. But it is theater. It’s a theory gone amok leaving with organizations that deal with people as a business have been forced to implement expensive, drawn out, and costly (for both business and customer) processes that are not really working.
There are many many more cases we will (are) work(ing) on.
Sometimes you will hear that ‘Web 3’ is going to solve it. Sometimes ‘DIDs’. Hell - even the NFT unicorns were making promises at one point. ‘Cyber’ … ‘AI’ … there is an ongoing barrage of people that talk hypothetically about the problem - but there still isn’t really a solution. They might well be the answer - maybe - but not today
- There needs to be wider adoption.
- It needs to be easy AND safe.
- There needs to be trust.
- It needs to be cost effective.
- There should be no barriers.
- We definitely should not be waiting for whatever the ‘tech d’jour’ is to grant us salvation.
We call all that Identity 3.0 - and who knows - just like Web 3.0 it may happen one day.
We call our solution Identity 2.5 - because it does not use tech that is not available - rather it sits in existing infrastructure that is already in place.
We have a working demo. We have patents. We have commitment from the NZ Govt. We believe we are unique - and nobody that has seen it disagrees.
We are moving forward.
Later
This seems to have caught attention since I originally posted it, so in order to save you time, if you are interested in what I am talking about and want to learn more, you can drop me an email - and be sure I will get right back to you. My thanks for your attention.
At the beginning of the year I had grand plans for this series. A daily long-form post about something that was rattling my brain that day. And then life. For a while, I was even just dropping markers - to revisit. I came to realise that part of the problem was the complexity of the structure for each post - so that went away. Simplicity really is rather nice. As I write on 240413, I am now going back and filling in the gaps. PLUS - unless something strikes me immediately, I will not classify until the end of the day and go back to move one of the posts of the day into the 366. Also - if you are wondering how I have update the words at the bottom of over 100 posts at a stroke, well - THANK YOU Andy Sylvester and his Glossary plugin.