Identitynet

It’s a simple idea.

 
Anywhere you go in this world, you can prove that you have some attribute. But at the very same time, absolutely all other information about you remains private.

The inquirer gets nothing but an opaque token. Its existence validates that they did check for that attribute and it was successful at that time, nothing else. It would be anonymous, they might link it to some other information they have, but that is up to them.

A check would be in two stages: request and approve. You will see the request and then be able to approve or decline it.

To get around access issues, most people would have one or more delegates. Their delegates could approve or decline on their behalf.

The incoming request would always have the identity of the requester. These would be validated, so trustworthy.

If you were the delegate of someone who got arrested in a foreign country, you would see which officials were making requests about their attributes and be able to accept or deny them. The person arrested might not have access to technology.

Requests would come from an individual or a person on behalf of some organization. In the case of lower-level employees, the requestor would be anonymized you would only see the organization, but it is still trackable and accurate. If there were an issue with that employee, the organization would be able to see who they were, but only in some sort of legal case could they be forced to reveal them. Still, you would have proof that a duly appointed person for that organization did receive confirmation.

You could have lots of different delegates for different attributes. In some cases like citizenship, your attribute would just wrap a token that your country has accepted you as their citizen. You would essentially pass that along.

Access to this system and its information would be available everywhere around the world. It could not be blocked or interfered with by territorial governments.

You can set whatever attributes you want, but getting official ones is a two or more hops to process. You might want to be able to prove that you are the owner of funds in a bank account somewhere. But more likely you would just want to approve a transfer of funds to someone else, while the source account remains anonymous. A token would act as a receipt and a verification that the source funds exist and have been allocated for that transfer. The actual transfer would take place outside, between institutions, and settled at their convenience. That type of token would have a best-before date.

To get all of this to work, you need a globally accessible protocol that can verify the correctness of the tokens it is issuing. The tokens would be secure. You can not tamper with them or fake them. It needs to be fully distributed to avoid being compromised by any individuals, organizations, or governments. As long as both parties can tap into the Internet, the request and approval mechanics will function.

There would be legal remedies for the issuers or holders of these tokens to have to reveal them at times. A token might be evidence in a criminal or civil case for example. If someone requested one of your tokens from the holder, it would be issued as a token itself and you would receive a token about who they are. So, you would know immediately that that person checked your earlier token. You could turn this off as needed.

The tokens themselves would be quite large, but as they are also formal receipts for tracking one half of the request, they are storable and searchable. Declined requests would occupy no space on either side. To prevent DoS attacks, there would be an auto decline that could be turned on for a while.

Some non-formal requests would also be auto-declined. A stranger asking for your name or email, for example. Someone could not scoop these up in a public place.

For social media, the returned tokens could be anonymized. So you could post, without an account, and only legal actions could be used to find out who you are. But you could also issue tokens that publically identify that your post is associated with your account on their site. Both would work, and the social media site is not in control of what is happening.

There would need to be some small type of fee established for using these tokens, mostly to prevent misuse. There could be some way of making it discounted for some people while charging others a fair rate. Likely requests for discounted services would bounce the discount to a different party for approval. You might get your government or a charity to authorize your reduced token rates for example. This would level the playing field for usage.

In that way, tokens would be stacked. One token might link a whole chain of other tokens together to prove a complex attribute, but to reveal all of it in its full detail would require legal remedies against each party in the chain. This would allow eventual transparency, but in a way that could not be abused. You would know who is tracing the token.

Someone could get a social media site to reveal some tokens. Those would link back to an identity provider or government. Going there might have another level of indirection. It might take some time to get to the end of the chain, but the chain is finite, so it would be possible.

All the attributes about you that you might need to share in your life would be tokens in this way. You would have a one-stop location for identifying just the things you want others to know about yourself. You would know what you revealed and to whom.

As all tokens are time-related, you could change those attributes as you need to. So, the trail would be reasonable, you used to prefer to be called Bill, but now it is William. You used to live in the suburbs, but now you reside downtown. The tokens would reflect this, and the dates attached to them would let the holders know both when they are stale and when they should be legally deleted.

This would make a lot of things in life easier, yet provide some protection against the bad stuff.