Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality

contents/english/04-01-identity-and-personhood.md

@@ -133,15 +133,16 @@ A lengthy hearing the Indian Supreme Court has significantly limited the extent
 
      On the other hand, if privacy is protected, as in Worldcoin, by using biometrics only to initialize an account, the system becomes vulnerable to stealing or selling of accounts. Because most services people seek to access require more than proving they are a unique human (e.g. that they have a particular name, an ID number of some type issued to them by a recognized government, that they are a citizen of some country, and maybe some other attributes like educational or employment credentials at a company etc.) this extreme preservation of privacy undermines most of the utility of the system. Furthermore, such systems place a great burden on the technical performance of biometric systems.  If eyeballs can, sometime in the future, be spoofed by artificial intelligence systems combined with advanced printing technology, such a system may be subject to an extreme "single point of failure". In short, despite their important capacity for inclusion and simplicity, biometric systems are too reductive to achieve establish and protect identities with the richness and security required to support Plurality.  
 
-      Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs.  Work on "decentralized identity" grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure, issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control.  A key founding document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" [^LawsOfIdentities], which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, minimal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, pluralism of participation, integration with human users and consistency of experience across context.  In an attempt to achieve systems conforming to these principles decentralized identity advocates have developed protocols and open standards that grant individuals "ownership" over Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), rooted in "public" data repositories such as blockchains, and create standardized formats for a variety of entities to issue credentials to these accounts.
+      Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs. Work on "decentralized identity" (DID) grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure, issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control. A key founding document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" [^LawsOfIdentities], which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, minimal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, pluralism of participation, integration with human users and consistency of experience across context. Kim Cameron worked on develoing the cardspace [^CS] system while at MSFT and this became the InformationCard [^icard] standards. These did not get market adoption in part because they were too early - smart phones were not widely adopted yet and the idea that this device could hold a wallet for people.
 
-     These systems generally plan to allow individuals to have multiple accounts/pseudonyms.  They also share a common practical challenge, namely that for an individual to truly "own" their identity, they must either control some ultimate key that gives them access to it and/or be able to reliably recover that key without resort to some higher, controlling authority.  Other than possibly biometrics (the problems with which we discussed above), there is no widely agreed method to allow recover without a trusted authority and no example of keys that individuals have been reliably able to self-manage in large, diverse societies.
+      With the emergence of crypto currencies and distributed append only ledgers that can store information indefinately in a public way. The community focused on user-centric identity considered how this could be used to achieve the vision of people really being the pivot point or control locus of their own digital represntations (rather then being at the affect of a central athority assigning them an identifier (corporate SSO or an Aahdaar like system) that they had to authenticate against but ultimately didn't control. They developed the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard [^DID] at the W3C that defines a way to have decentralized globally resolvable endpoints with associated public keys. This creates a way to grant individuals "ownership" over identities, rooted in "public" data repositories such as blockchains, and create standardized formats for a variety of entities to issue digital credentials referencing these identifiers.
 
+     The systems have the flexability to allow individuals to have multiple accounts/pseudonyms. They also share a common practical challenge, namely that for an individual to truly "own" their identity, they must either control some ultimate key that gives them access to it and/or be able to reliably recover that key without resort to some higher, controlling authority. Other than possibly biometrics (the problems with which we discussed above), there is no widely agreed method to allow recover without a trusted authority and no example of keys that individuals have been reliably able to self-manage in large, diverse societies.
 
-       Despite these common challenges, the details of these schemes vary dramatically, however.  On one extreme, advocates of "verifiable credentials" (VCs) prioritize privacy and the ability of users to control which of the claims about them are presented at any time.  On the other extreme, advocates of "soulbound tokens" (SBTs) or other blockchain-centric identity systems emphasize the importance of credentials that are public commitments to e.g. repay a loan or not produce further replicas of a work of art and thus require that the claims be publicly tied to an identity.  Here, again, in both the challenges around recovery and the DID/VC-SBT debate we see the unattractive trade-off between establishing and protecting identities.
-
-     Many recent initiatives around identity from the creation of "SMART Health Cards" for vaccination status and by the European Union to create a Europe-wide, interoperable digital identity worked to try to navigate this battlefield.  Given the centrality in these contexts of both establishing and protecting identity, the slow progress of many of these initiatives is hardly surprising.    
+       The architectural design for digital credentials with an issuer of credentials, a holder (often the subject) of the credentials and the relying party who receives and verifies (checks the cryptography) the credentials has achieved significant adoption. The European Union deploying it to all citizens within the next several years. It is developing an open source code base[^wallet] for member states to be able to use to give every citizen a digital wallet. At the time of writing they have begun 4 large scale pilots [^pilots] that will test the system with 10s of millions of citizens. The country of Bhutan has built its whole digital identity system with this design architecture[^bhutan]. When a citizen is enrolled in a national register with biometrics and then is given a digital wallet with credentials derived from the enrollment. To interact with government and private sector services they present the credentials from the wallet - there is no phone home architecture like corporate SSO systems or India's Aadhaar system.
 
+      Despite these common challenges, the details of these schemes vary dramatically, however. On one extreme, advocates of "verifiable credentials" (VCs) prioritize privacy and the ability of users to control which of the claims about them are presented at any time. On the other extreme, advocates of "soulbound tokens" (SBTs) or other blockchain-centric identity systems emphasize the importance of credentials that are public commitments to e.g. repay a loan or not produce further replicas of a work of art and thus require that the claims be publicly tied to an identity. Here, again, in both the challenges around recovery and the DID/VC-SBT debate we see the unattractive trade-off between establishing and protecting identities.
+
 
 
 ### Identity as an interseciton
@@ -205,3 +206,8 @@ In fact, the way we think of others identities are usually primarily in terms of
 [^Altman]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/worldcoin-aims-set-up-global-id-network-akin-indias-aadhaar-2023-11-02/
 [^LawsOfIdentities]: Kim Cameron's [Laws of Identities](https://www.identityblog.com/?p=1065) (blog post, August 2009)
 [^MOSIP] (https://docs.mosip.io/inji/overview)https://docs.mosip.io/inji/overview
+[^wallet] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/
+[^pilots] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-digital-identity-4-projects-launched-test-eudi-wallet
+[^bhutan] https://restofworld.org/2023/south-asia-newsletter-bhutan-national-digital-id/
+[^icard] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_card
+[^CS] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CardSpace