Chapter 1: Knowing You — The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (2021)

Chapter 1: Knowing You. In 2015, the United Nations committed itself to achieving 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, addressing fundamental humanitarian issues such as poverty, hunger, clean water, and education. The 16th of these goals relates to justice, and amid its dozen or so recommendations comes Clause 16.9, to provide legal identity for all. There are now growing calls to enshrine this clause in the UN calendar by setting aside the 16th of September as International Identity Day to raise awareness about the key role that legal identity plays in empowering individuals to exercise their rights and responsibilities fairly and equitably in a modern society. And that's what an estimated 1 billion people around the world don't have. An official form of identification that proves who they are and so gives them access to all the health, finance, and other services that they're entitled to receive. The two words that really matter here are not legal identity so much as modern society. This is an issue born in the 21st century. Digital technologies are transforming the way that societies work, not only in the way that we interact with the state as individual citizens, but more fundamentally, in the way that we identify as individuals at all. Who we are matters, but so too does how our identities are created, controlled, and authenticated in a digital society, and who by. As with poverty, hunger, clean water, and education, we must not take our legal identity for granted. Nothing is as fixed as it seems. Take the concept of nationality, for example. Traditionally a key and fixed marker of how we identify ourselves. The idea that we can simply choose our nationality might sound unlikely, but we're already heading in that direction. Last year, I put in my application for Estonian e-residency. I had been talking about it for years in presentations at events, and yet I hadn't got around to actually applying. When the scheme started in 2014, successful applicants had to travel to Estonia to pick up their documentation, but these days, Estonian embassies around the are authorised to carry out the task, making the process much more accessible and affordable. Just as well, given that when I was due to collect mine, there was no possibility of travel to another nation, as most had been locked down in the COVID-19 global pandemic. The application procedure is straightforward enough. I had to fill in an online form, pay a small admin fee, and send off some supporting documentation, and not long afterwards I was contacted by the Estonian Police and Border Guard with instructions on where and when to go to the Estonian Embassy once lockdown was over. And so it was that I headed over to Queensgate Terrace in London, where I was met by a personable and efficient woman in gloves behind a Perspex screen. I handed over my passport, checked my personal details, had my fingerprints taken on both hands, and took receipt of my digital identity card, my PIN codes for access, and my smart card reader. In less than 15 minutes, it was all sorted, and off I went, voicing a cheery nagamist and feeling like a world citizen. Writing in the embassy's magazine Life in Estonia, the former manager of the e-Residency programme, Kaspar Korjus, explains the thinking behind the scheme. To quote, 'The story of e-Residency is a story about a country that is much bigger than a physical entity limited by its geographical border. Almost every country in the world wants their share of the international talent pool. What makes Estonia stand apart is the fact that we realised that in the 21st century, Immigration no longer needs to be physical. In a digital society, we can let people participate digitally. End quote. Estonia saw the digital revolution coming much earlier than most. As far back as 1994, it released the first draft of The Principles of Estonian Information Policy, which paved the way for digital transformation. By the turn of this century, the first e-Cabinet was already in place, By 2002, e-identity and digital signature had been launched. E-voting followed in 2005. Blockchain technology was adopted in 2008, and a whole plethora of e-public services followed, including e-Residency, the first digital nation for global citizens. Launched in 2014, it underlined Estonia's ambition to deliver on its longstanding goal of becoming a digital nation, a borderless Baltic state in the cloud. Rumour has it that at the start of the 21st century, some officials even toyed with changing the name of the country to Estonia.com. Of course, being an e-resident does not entitle me or anyone else to Estonian citizenship. Right now, it is a transnational digital identity that allows you as a foreign founder to set up a company in Estonia without the physicality of being there. It is also worth mentioning that the application process requires you not only to give your address, a recent photo, and passport details, but also your full CV, details of any criminal record, and your motivation to become an e-resident. That is a lot of personal data to hold on to someone who's not even a citizen. However, it's not hard to imagine this is a major step towards the building of a digital state that could offer a form of citizenry to anyone in the future. Today, the nation of Estonia has 1.3 million citizens in the traditional sense, but it also has 63,000 e-residents from 167 countries and 10,100 new e-resident companies that have so far paid over €31 million in direct taxes to the Estonian economy. In August 2020, the country also launched its Digital Nomad Visa, which allows for remote workers to operate from Estonia for up to a year. In addition to freelancers, it permits teleworking from Estonia for anyone who has a foreign employer or is a partner in a company registered abroad. Of course, it entitles e-residents to do the same, too, so that they can go to Estonia to live or work and get to know the digital nation even more. As the digital revolution continues, there is every reason to imagine a future in which other countries follow Estonia's example. Effectively competing with each other for our citizenship. Nations would actively seek to attract new citizens, the best talent, and the innovators and businesses of the highest value on the basis of the quality of their digital infrastructure. And we could choose to identify ourselves with whichever software nation has the most appeal for us. Basically, if you didn't like your government, you could unplug, pick up, and leave. Proponents of this so-called cloud governance structure believe it's just a natural evolution of the way we already inhabit digital communities. Folks finding their ideological compatriots in the cloud and then migrating physically is the story of the century, says Balaji Srinivasan, an ex-Stanford lecturer and now Silicon Valley investor. In his vision of the future, countries could be built in the cloud and then materialised in a physical space. This might sound fantastical, but trends researcher Kevin Lee explained to me how it ties in with how young people in China already operate. I'd say 80% of culture is online and only 20% is offline. And the 20% offline is when I am walking around a mall, I'm walking in the street and I don't even see the people around me. The only people that really exist to you are the people connected to you online. 'Everyone else offline, they're just human bodies. There is no identity there,' he said. If digitisation has the potential to disrupt the way that we identify ourselves as citizens, it is also changing the way that the state interacts with us. Governments are having to provide more services and infrastructure digitally in order to remain competent, affordable, and efficient.. And for that to work, our digital identities are becoming increasingly important to them. In August 2020, TechUK, the trade association for the UK's technology industry, published a report calling on the UK government to accelerate plans for a digital identity system, arguing that such a system is vital if transactions are to be carried out efficiently and accurately in an increasingly remote and virtually communicating world, they recommended that digital identity verification become part of the process for activities such as seeking a job, applying for state benefits, purchasing age-restricted products, and buying and selling property. In the same way that TechUK sees the potential transactional benefits of a digital identity system, so too do economic analysts and management consultants. Both for developed and developing countries. For example, in an April 2019 report on the potential economic impact of digital identification on Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, the UK, and the USA, McKinsey has suggested that each nation could unlock economic value equivalent to 3-13% of GDP in 2030, with just over half of the potential economic value potentially accruing to individuals, assuming high adoption rates. The report also re-emphasises the civic and social benefits of such a system, especially for the 1 in 5 people in the world without a bank account, and the disproportionate number of women who are disadvantaged in this way in low-income countries. But without wishing to be too cynical, it is easier to imagine governments being more influenced by the economic benefits, particularly those struggling to bolster their growth in markets where GDP is flat. These are well-rehearsed arguments in parts of the world such as Africa, where it is not so much a case of transition from physical services to digital services as it is a transition from having no identity system at all. In countries such as Nigeria, Angola, and Ethiopia, for example, the number of people with no legal identity papers at all is extremely high, excluding them from basic activities, —such as banking—that most people in the West take for granted. In 2014, representatives of governments, development agencies, and industry came together to form ID4Africa, a movement dedicated to the promotion of identity for all in Africa. Arguing that identity is not just a legal right but a practical necessity in a digital economy, ID4Africa has become the lead voice in the call for the United Nations to name 16 September as International Identity Day. Nigeria has already made it National Identity Day. It has also lent its weight to the UN's pursuit of legal identity as one of the Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. The UN's 2030 deadline is not the only reason for governments to feel under pressure to digitise their nations and services. For the first time in history, they face a brand new type of competition. Not just other nation states looking to muscle in on their territory, but global technology corporations too. If governments do not keep up with technology, it is likely that these companies will step in to fill the gap. In a 2018 interview for libertarian magazine Reason, Bajlajee Srinivasan remarked that, to quote, 'Snapchat is on a straight line with a disillusion of the nation-state,' arguing that this kind of social platform means that we have more in common with people scattered across the world than we do with our next-door neighbours. He expanded on the theme in another interview in 2020, saying, 'In the last 10 years or so, every company had to become a software company or die—taxis, hotels. I think that is happening now at the level of countries.' Srinivasan believes that we're heading towards the formation of network states, and that they will be run by someone more like a top tech CEO than a traditional politician. People such as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore, whose vision of creating a smart nation by 2025 is informed by a master's degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge. Lots of software CEOs will eventually start becoming effectively de facto heads of state, says Srinivasan, pointing to the respect already shown to such CEOs by political leaders. A few years ago, there was a person running a small 60-million-person social network called the United Kingdom who was really happy to do a video chat with the person running a billion-person social network called Facebook. David Cameron understood that Mark Zuckerberg controls the distribution that controls his re-election. He said. Investor Adam Townsend takes this idea further, suggesting that tech platforms not only offer competition to traditional forms of government but are a potential substitution for the nation-state itself. Amazon can no longer be thought of as a company, says Townsend, it's a country. According to this thinking, in the future, we won't be able to differentiate between the United States and a preferred monopoly ecosystem such as Amazon or Apple. For Townsend, it all comes down to convenience. "Most people would rather be a citizen of Google than the United States because Google or Facebook are more responsive to them as a constituent," he said. Thinking of these companies as countries is not fanciful. Technology platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon have three things nation-states do not have: huge cash reserves to finance the building of a cloud country, world-class expertise in software engineering, and customer data and insight—lots and lots of it. During the 21st century, we may see a completely new model emerge, one in which nation-states start to behave like technology companies, while technology companies start to behave like nation-states. Public utilities and services that have traditionally been delivered to us by local or national governments will increasingly be provided by technology companies, whether it's environmental pollution monitoring, newspaper publishing, food deliveries, or education. In this blurring of the lines between technology companies and civic government organisations, if it does come to pass, it would have far-reaching consequences for us as citizens, not least because whoever is administrating our utilities and services would need our identity details to authenticate us. In this scenario, the determination of your identity would not simply be down to you and the state, it would be between you and all the various companies that provide you with services. Your identity would be built up through some kind of continuous monitoring of your digital footprint, tracking everywhere you go, with whom, and at what time, building up a picture of you and who you are. While neither option may look that appetising for the freedom lovers amongst us, our digital identities are going to become much more central to the way we interact with the world around us. Either national governments are going to start incorporating top-down digital identities via their own governance structures, or technology companies will deliver data-rich identity systems built from the ground up. To get an idea of what it might look like to live in such a data-driven world, let's take a look at the Canadian city of Toronto. In October 2017, the city launched a joint venture with urban innovation specialist Sidewalk Labs, owned by the same holding company as Google, to develop the eastern waterfront area of the city. Their vision for the development, set out in their publicly available Master Innovation and Development Plan, relies heavily on the transformative power of data and digitalisation to create a more inclusive environment for all. Detailed plans include the all-but-abolition of traditional cars in favour of self-driving cars, bicycles, and more pedestrian areas. Transit services, shared cars, and scheduled pickups and drop-offs will make life easier and more affordable in the city. Freight management and logistics will be delivered through a hub of underground interconnected tunnels. Real-time traffic management tools and people-first streets will make for a more balanced transportation system, in which private trips made by car will only make up around 10% of the total trips taken. Sidewalk Labs has even costed the economic benefits to families of adopting this package of new transport services—so the discounted train and bus passes, unlimited bike share, ride-hail credits, and other options—claiming that it amounts to a saving of $4,000 compared to owning your own car. This mobility vision integrates street design, innovation policy, and transportation technologies to set a bold new course for urban mobility, claims the Sidewalk Toronto Plan, telling us less than nothing about what living in this data-driven city will actually feel like for a human being. My suspicion is that the venture's much-trumpeted people-first approach will not really put people first at all. It will put technology first. Imagine not being able to take your own car anywhere, but having to rely on a trackable shared car, toggling between pickup and drop-off points that are constantly analysed and monitored, as you will be while using them. There would be almost no escape from ongoing and continuous surveillance in cities like this because every service you need is digitised and data-driven, and ultimately therefore, so are you. The incentives are obviously economic, but the potential loss, which is not calculated nor even mentioned, is societal and cultural, and ultimately one of personal liberty. Your movements, spending habits, and patterns of activity throughout the day could all be combined to build up a picture of you as an individual, which could be used to authenticate your identity in the future, or even to incentivise you to alter or moderate your behaviour if it is no longer deemed acceptable by city dwellers in this inclusive community. Sidewalk Labs' plans have actually been shelved now, following problems with acquiring permissions and some regulatory objections, but it's far from the only attempt to create a so-called smart city. In fact, if regulatory barriers were to halt all of these developments, there's another way to escape any such problems: by making use of international waters to prototype a smart city in the sea, beyond the jurisdiction of any nation-state altogether. A company called Ocean Builders is attempting to prove that a successfully built community of floating homes is possible. They began by building a prototype in shallow waters not far from the coast of Thailand, 3D printing the homes and using a decentralised system of ownership for the control of shares in it. Despite its location outside of Thailand's territorial waters—well, according to GPS data later produced by Ocean Builders—the site was judged by the Thai government to be a threat to the country's sovereignty, and it was duly seized and destroyed by its navy. Ocean Builders has since chosen to continue its work in Panamanian waters. The practice of creating a floating community outside the territory claimed by any nation-state is called 'seasteading'. Its underlying philosophy is best captured in a book by Joe Kirk and Patri Friedman, called Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians. Hard to say no to that, isn't it? And it's not as new an idea as it might seem, as seasteading proponent Jake Tran explains. We already have cities and other giant structures on the sea. They're called cruise ships. Japan's many giant airport islands, container ships, Shell's floating natural facilities,— nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers that can stay at sea for 15 to 20 years before refuelling, many more examples. It really isn't so outlandish to imagine floating cities being established around the most profitable areas of the world, where they can become platforms for experiments in different types of governance, redefining what it means to be a nation or a citizen, and attracting or putting off potential inhabitants according to their success. Whether on land or sea or cloud, designed by existing governments or reimagined by technology companies, there can be little doubt that future forms of governance will be data-driven, and that we will all require a digital identity in some form or another. Quite how this future will affect you depends in large part on the kind of digital identity system adopted by the state. And three different approaches are starting to emerge: centralised, federated, and decentralised. Most of us are already used to the way a centralised model works, even if we have never really thought about it. When we go online and log in to, say, Facebook with a password or a PIN number, we are effectively relying on Facebook to authenticate our identity by comparing our submitted details to those stored on its own central database. The locus of control resides within the organisation or service rather than with the individual user, and some governments have adopted the same approach. India, for example, has embarked on a system to identify every single one of its citizens, and there are over 1 billion of them. It is compiling a database in which its citizens' identities are tied to their biometrics. —mostly via fingerprints. Commercially developed apps can then make use of this database, for example, to allow citizens to pay for goods using their biometrics rather than their credit card. According to Chris Burt, editor of online news service Biometric Update, this isn't a development limited to India. Banks all over the world are coming out in favour of using the fingerprint as a biometric replacement for the credit card. Whether you are using the card or your smartphone that is linked through to the card, the card is registered to the phone. So the banks have decided that we will be using biometrics for contactless payments. Now I know why they took my fingerprints on both hands while I visited the Estonian embassy. The point is that we all need to bear in mind, centralized systems dictate the format of authentication and the types of technology that will be imposed on us for the purposes of authentication. And there is little, if any, participatory discussion or debate. It is perhaps no surprise that China's authoritarian government has opted for a centralised identity system too. Known by many as the 'social credit system', Chinese citizens have carried physical identity cards since 2004, bearing an 18-digit code that combines personal information, such as their date of birth, and the identity of the local authority that issued the card.. But these cards took on an intriguing new function after the publication in 2014 of the planning outline for the construction of a social credit system. As Rogier Kremers, a lecturer at Leiden University and one of the foremost academic experts in this area, told me, the system was designed to aid China's ongoing transformation from a planned economy to a market economy by, to quote, building up a lending industry where the vast majority of people are unbanked, so there is no record to fall back on in order to see whether or they are able to repay the money they've been lent. In other words, the social credit system was about trust in an increasingly digital age. In fact, 'credit' in Mandarin Chinese doesn't just mean financial credit; it carries an element of trustworthiness, integrity, and moral uprightness. The idea was to foster a 'sincerity culture,' to reward those who pay their bills, honour their debts, and trade in quality goods. And to penalise those who did not. After a lot of local experimentation, the system has since evolved into a complex instrument that provides a degree of internal government oversight, and we will return to the implications of that in a later chapter. For now, it is important to note that the origins of the system were purely administrative, aimed at providing citizens with access to digital services while finding a trustworthy way to record those exchanges. Of course, just because you have an identity card with a date of birth on it, and you're even able to produce the right password, there is still no guarantee that you really are that person. It turns out that a centralised model is barely an identity model at all, unless you link it to biometrics as they have done in India. But that makes this a rather authoritarian, Big Brother approach that is much less likely to work for Western governments,, where populations are much more suspicious, and where some countries have in the past rejected any form of identity system, let alone a digital one. For that reason, most Western nations instead operate some kind of federated identity system anchored to a social security number, or a national insurance number, such as the one the UK government have developed over the past 20 years. Known as GOV.UK Verify, it aims to create a single trusted identity for login to all digital services for any citizen than in the UK, based on the use of a federation of autonomous trusted service providers, identity assurance services, or commercial organizations such as your bank, the tax office, and the postal service. With this model, identity proofing does not depend on possession of a single breeder document, such as a birth certificate or passport. Instead, you essentially prove your identity by providing access to an identity evidence package, That includes assurances from public sector services like the NHS and the tax office, as well as private partners such as your bank, the Post Office, or approved personal identity apps. The notion is that this federated plurality of public and private sector partners should be able to provide the right assurances about your identity and yet still give the individual citizen a sense of privacy and control. However, translating this theory into practice has proven challenging. According to technologist Gerry Fishenden, who has worked as a special advisor on digital government to the UK House of Commons, the private sector may know who someone is in terms of their own relationship with them, such as the credit card or banking record, but doesn't know anything about who they are to a government department. Likewise, a government department knows who someone is in terms of their own existing relationship such as their welfare payments, but isn't necessarily up to date with who that person may be in the outside world. And different bits of government and different bits of the private sector have different relationships and different knowledge about the same person, he said. To put it another way, what looks on the surface to be the strength of the federated system, the public-private partnership, is in fact its Achilles heel. Another problem here is recovery. Once your identity is in some way compromised within this federated system, there is no central point of recovery for you to wrestle back control. It's the equivalent of having one website login compromised and losing access not just to that account but to the internet in its entirety. Except it's worse, because you could be losing access to your bank account, mortgage arrangements, or the details of your company registration. Every aspect of your identity is affected and regaining control is a torturous, labyrinthine process. This perhaps explains why UK consumers are increasingly downloading identity apps onto their smartphones so that they can take control of managing their identity themselves. In Jersey, for example, more than half of 18- to 25-year-olds have already downloaded the JOTI app, which they can use to prove their age at retail or hospitality establishments and festivals. Individuals are acquiring, storing, and authorising the selective release of their identifying attributes as and when they deem relevant, creating their own modular digital identity systems that they can keep in their pocket. Sure enough, in 2018, the UK government announced to Parliament that funding for the system would end in March 2020, though that was subsequently extended for a further 18 months. It also set up a consultation process, and in September 2020 reported that it was creating the Digital Identity Strategy Board, seemingly to bring together numerous government departments from the Home Office to the Department for Health and Social Care, all of which seem to have been developing their own versions of digital ID. What seems clear so far is that a federated model, such as the UK has attempted, sounds great in theory, but is simply too complex and contextual for the state to implement with ease. That leaves us with a third approach to a digital identity system, the decentralised model, which is said by its proponents to be based on true interconnectivity across all parts of the system, such that the ownership and management of identity is only ever by the individual end users themselves. To understand how this kind of decentralised system works, we need to look at the technology that underpins it. It's called blockchain, and it is essentially a database for recording and tracking anything of value from your financial transactions to your medical property or even voting records. What's clever about it is that the database isn't held in one single location. There's no central administrator and nobody owns it. Instead, it relies on what's called distributed ledger technology, through which data is stored in discrete blocks that are linked together in a chain. If a change is made to any information, nothing is erased, corrected, or rewritten. That change is recorded and stored in a new block that is added to the chain and given a timestamp that records the date and time. In this way, a database is built up of tamper-proof, shared, and synchronized data that everyone on the network can see and which can never be undone. What this means in practice is that all entries into the blockchain ledger can be trusted. A block is only ever added to a chain if all the computers that make up the network have completed a series of difficult mathematical puzzles, which once solved, very verify the work. This way, trust is distributed across the network. It means that there is no need for intermediaries like lawyers or bankers to authenticate information or verify identities, and transactions can be carried out directly by users in a peer-to-peer way. There is also flexibility in this kind of decentralized system to create some blockchains as public, available for everyone to access, while others are private, limiting access only to authorized users. In a decentralized digital identity system based on this kind of technology, an identity isn't just one thing. It's a series of proofs or what one might call attestations or credentials, identifying data essentially, that can be treated like a financial transaction and written into the immutable ledger of the blockchain. Given that many of these credentials will have been accumulated through one's own digital footprint and exist as personal data already, it is an approach that can more readily take account of the relationships between identifying data and the individual identified, which was one of the main issues with the federated model. Bank accounts, passports, credit reports, qualifications, personal address details, and workplace location all of our personal histories together with our ongoing digital footprint could come together in a package of credentials that attest to who we are. The potential for this kind of decentralised model has yet to be fully mined, but as Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna suggest in their book The Truth Machine, quote, the idea is big. If you can establish a standard interoperable architecture for people to accumulate their data within a blockchain address that they control, That address could become a single foundational distributed identity layer that opens digital doors across different ledger and blockchain ecosystems and allows innovators to start building powerful applications that key into those identities, opening the door to a world of decentralized commerce. So that is to say, storing your identifying data on a blockchain in this way means others can have complete trust in its authenticity, as can anyone else to whom you choose to give access. One company pursuing this decentralized model, or self-sovereign identity framework, often known as SSI, is Sovryn. The Sovryn network takes all of your standard forms of identification and credentials, such as your bank account, academic qualifications, or driver's license, and turns them into digital credentials that you can then store in an app called a digital wallet. Whenever necessary, you can then provide custom copies of these credentials, known as proofs, that are just as trustworthy as the originals. Choosing only to show the specific required pieces of information someone is asking for, never all of your personal information all the time. The Sovryn website explains how this process would work. If you were doing something like applying for a loan where the bank needs a lot of personal information to complete your application and may ask you to prove specific information about yourself, like your legal name, current address, or employment history. Using your Sovryn-enabled digital wallet, you would create the required proof from your set of credentials. From your taxes to credit card statements or employment records, the proof you share with the bank would only contain the information they specifically asked for and none of the other private details they didn't need. The bank would then use the Sovryn network to verify the proof, able to trust that the information is correct. On one level, this just sounds like another example of technology replicating what we can already get in the physical world, in this case providing us with a digital rather than physical proof of identity. But there are principles at work here that we should all care about. What platforms like Sovryn, and any startups that offer services via its platform, provide is an identity controlled by you, the owner or user. That means, for example, that you can, for the first time, walk away from consumer services you no longer want without leaving all of your personal information behind. Companies will only be able to see your information when you want them to, but none would be able to obtain and store that data. As Natalie Smolenski of Highland Software says, 'When we talk about identity, when we talk about social personhood, we're really in the realm of something like fundamental human rights.' The best explanation I've come across of what digital self-sovereignty means was given to me by Drummond Reid, Chief Trust Officer at Evernym, a self-sovereign identity vendor based on the Sovryn platform. Taking his wallet out of his pocket, he said, "This is self-sovereign identity. It's just not digital. I own this leather, this wallet. I don't own the credentials inside." They are issued and on loan to me, and the issuers can always revoke them. But, he explains, it is he who decides what goes in the wallet and what gets left out of the wallet, whether it's his driving license, bank cards, or gym membership. And it is he who controls who sees them, and anyone he does show his credentials to can verify him against them. We're not trying to do anything different, he says. Other than make all that work digitally. This explanation certainly resonates with me. I've always thought it odd that if I use my physical driving licence to prove my age, I am also showing everyone my address details. That's right, a UK driving licence has your full address printed on it. This means if your handbag gets stolen, most likely containing both your driving licence and your front door keys, you're almost certainly going to get home to find out that you've been robbed there too. With your own set of digital credentials, you could go to the shop to buy alcohol, and if you are asked to prove your age, you could just show the relevant credential without exposing any other personal information, whether it's your name, address, or anything else. One of the challenges for this kind of decentralised approach is that it puts the onus on technology companies and their consumers to administrate it, leaving the state out in the cold. Another is that the sheer number of innovations and business models emerging in this space are making interoperability almost impossible. Drummond Read has been working on internet identity for over 20 years and is now trying to develop a system that can support all the different ledgers' database systems. His goal? To create standardization. All the wallets and all the interactions between them need to be interoperable. So that what you have works everywhere with everything else. How, he likes to ask, would you feel if you bought a leather wallet and you could only put Mastercard credit cards in it? You need to be able to choose any wallet for any vendor in the world and be able to put any credential from any issuer in there and have any verifier be able to accept it. It's some time away, but if that happens, we'll finally have as much control over our digital identities as we do in the analogue world. If we follow this model, it could be that the nation-state will play an increasingly unimportant role in authenticating us in our everyday lives, and as a result, it may try to overcompensate by tightening control in other spheres. One area where that might happen is currency, which is also being driven towards a digital format that will end up sat in your digital wallet alongside your legal identity. We've already seen that as the world becomes more digitised, we are making less and less use of banknotes and coins that have for centuries represented our currency. Our day-to-day transactions will increasingly become transfers of data, as will our currencies, and quite how that plays out, well, will have a significant implication for the way we live our lives and the way we think about our identity. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin is probably the best-known example of a digital currency. Based on the blockchain technology discussed above, it was the first decentralised system of value storage and exchange, running on thousands of computers dispersed across the world, meaning it needs no central bank or even central computer to direct or control it. Users simply employ a private key to access their account and can carry out their transaction directly without having to go through an intermediary. And the supply of currency is limited. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins ever mined for circulation. At the moment, Bitcoin transactions for everyday purchases are quite costly, but that may change if more people make the switch to the system. It's perfectly possible to imagine that when making tiny payments for small pieces of content or gaining access to other microservices in the digital realm, Bitcoin micropayments will be the most convenient way to transact day-to-day. Slow to ban or attempt to regulate the development of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, financial authorities around the world have chosen to watch and wait. But it looks like they are ready to become more proactive. Central banks around the world, fearful that these peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies could one day render them redundant, are suddenly announcing a flurry of so-called central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. These are not cryptocurrencies in the way Bitcoin and others are. They are more like digital versions of the traditional fiat currencies, controlled and issued by the government, like digital dollars or pounds. On the plus side, given the strength of the infrastructure that these institutions can call upon, transactions of these proposed digital currencies should be more fluid and frictionless. But can we really trust the central banks with all this digital data, and do we really want our current governments to see everything we do, everywhere we go, and every time we transact with anyone else? It might be convenient, but it's also intrusive. So intrusive that with the amount of personal financial data governments could glean, they might as well own our own identity after all. Another option is emerging too. In 2019, Facebook produced a white paper introducing the world to its vision for a global digital currency called Libra, putting it in the running to become the world's first digital bank. Such a development would by definition represent a major shift in the way we think about legal identity, potentially empowering the 1.7 billion people worldwide who currently have no digital bank—mostly because they lack identity documentation. But we should be very wary of large corporations using the social problem as a cloak to dissuade critique. If we think of Facebook as a giant message board, it has until now pushed communications between people on its platform. But in this proposed future, it would push Libra-based transactions between people instead. After all, Facebook already offers a secure, sociable, and largely reliable messaging network used by over 2 billion people every day. So what's to stop it incorporating blockchain technology to make it a trusted platform for financial transactions? With a basket of assets like the dollar or government securities that could underpin its digital currency, people could be confident that the value of Libra would remain stable. Facebook's initial proposals have hit a regulatory roadblock, and there are now many changes planned to the initial proposals, including a change of name from Libra to Diem. However, I fully expect that the company will deliver Libra in some form or other in the coming decade and will somehow link a digital currency to our social identity. Regardless of whether the currency is a success, Cameron D'Ambrosio, presenter of the State of Identity podcast, believes Facebook may still come out of this as the power player in digital identity. In early 2020, he suggested to me that the company could be using the economic aspect of Libra as a shield to distract from the idea that they are really looking to build an identity platform. Facebook has already served as a de facto digital identity for billions of people around the world, and now it has the chance for Libra to serve as the true identity layer for many applications that folks use on a daily basis. It stands a great chance of being a functional digital identity platform that can operate on a global scale, he said. I think Dumprose is right. I'm convinced that Facebook, or any successor in this space, will attempt to transform its social network into an identity network. If not for individual consumers around the world, then certainly for businesses. Imagine you have a small business with a loyal e-commerce community on Facebook, and over time you are offered Libra. If you sign up to Libra and make use of their Calibra wallet— rebranding to Novi— You could use your Libra bank account details to sign into Facebook. You might even receive micropayments as incentives each and every time you do so. In a way, your name would become less important than your authenticating bank account information. In fact, you could say that your Libra bank account would essentially be your identity—just more valuable and harder to fake. Bitcoin fans might argue that Facebook's proposed system is too centralised, with Libra acting as the sole authenticating authority. And they are probably working on ways to ensure that it is your Bitcoin address that replaces your name as the most trustworthy representation of your identity. Either way, it seems likely that money will no longer be the state monopoly it was in the past, but will increasingly be manifested in the cloud. And with our banking activities tied so closely to our digital identities, that signals a sea change in the way that we think about our relationship with the state. However, the most fundamental way in which we interact with the state is by exercising our democratic right to vote. In 2018, the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain produced a landscape overview of blockchain technology, which included a case study on trusted and transparent voting systems. An interdisciplinary group had been tasked with considering blockchain as a potential means of transparent, and tamper-proof elections for companies and third-party organisations who wanted to manage shareholder votes. Although political elections were not included in the group's scope, it cannot be long before digital voting in political elections, linked and secured to one's digital identity, comes under serious consideration. After all, it's not as if the physical system we have at present doesn't have its flaws, and there are other examples around the world of more innovative and arguably fairer approaches via digital democracy. You won't be surprised to hear that Estonia has been a pioneer when it comes to i-voting. Since 2005, i-voters have been allowed to log into a voting platform using their ID card, mobile ID, and a desktop computer, and then cast a ballot. And they can do this around the clock, all the way up to the 4th day before the actual election. The 2019 parliamentary elections saw 247,232 electronic votes cast out of a total of 565,028 possible, demonstrating a 40% increase in participation compared to the previous national poll in 2015. Moreover, research indicates that there are high levels of trust towards iVoting too, with a system to ensure anonymity that offers a digital facsimile of the double envelope method for postal voting. That's where postal voters seal their choice into an inner blank envelope, then place the envelope into an outer envelope on which they write their name and address. Once delivered to the electoral officers, the details on the outer envelope are used to check and ensure that only one vote per voter will be counted. Then the outer envelope is discarded and the anonymous vote in the inner envelope is put into the ballot box for counting. For good measure, the digital version of this double envelope procedure is carried out on a computer that has no internal storage, no internet connection,, and is literally turned off immediately after the count, at which point all information disappears. If Estonia has been able to manage i-voting for over 15 years now, it seems likely that more democracies will become digitised over the course of the 21st century as our civic systems become more decentralised. Perhaps this will have knock-on benefits too, for example by tackling the issue of generational fairness in the electoral system. The convenience of i-voting might appeal to the younger generation, who are sometimes less likely to turn up to a polling booth in the middle of the day, but those less digitally literate will still have the option to vote in person. We already know that of the 30% of Estonians who vote online, 20% say that they would not vote in a physical polling station, which suggests digital voting does extend access and broadens the constituency. There's also the issue of trust. Citizens around the world appear to have less and less trust in the traditional administration of elections. Commissioned to write a paper on the subject for the European Parliamentary Research Service, sociologist Philip Barasher makes clear the decisions that lie ahead. Now we have a choice: to continue trusting central authorities to manage elections, or 'to use blockchain technologies to distribute an open voting record among citizens,' he says. It is a choice that nations cannot simply avoid, not least because the technology companies who increasingly provide our public services and issue us with credentials may well try to make it for them. Perhaps by 2040 we could all be i-voting via Facebook, or some kind of future equivalent. One way or another, it is hard not to conclude that there is an accelerating convergence between between who we are as citizens of states and who we are as consumers of services. The institutions that have traditionally upheld and authenticated our identities are themselves being disrupted and may soon find themselves competing with, or even being replaced by, technology corporations that seemingly enjoy closer, more convenient connections with their users. Territorial sovereignty may give way to technological sovereignty. And other countries across the digitally-led world will follow Estonia's lead by establishing innovative cloud governance structures. What is abundantly clear is that there is an ongoing progression towards the digitisation of individual identity, driven by the belief held by both nation-states and technology platforms that technology is what will make states great in the 21st century. As every aspect of your life becomes digitised—the way you work, travel, learn, play, shop, and vote—your identity graph is also moving away from nationhood on land to a brave new world in the cloud. And only if we take a revolutionary approach to a legal identity that you can control will we meet the changing needs of a 21st century you.