This set of articles discusses digital identity and how it affects people’s lives and businesses alike. The first part discusses digital identity and concerns associated with it. The second part discusses how Atomflow uniquely approaches digital identity starting with data ownership to information propagation.

Approaching the new industrial revolution it became clear that the new highest priced asset is two-fold: 1) data which can be used to produce insights, decisions and representative knowledge and 2) the ability to intelligently and autonomously process it, i.e., artificial intelligence. More precisely, data refers to endless streams of behavioural activities, clicks, searches, social shares produced by our online activities that are most likely linked to our real-life activities, personal information we supply to service providers and device-generated data all around the world. This data mesh, especially, personal data is of a great value as it is easily and lucratively monetised. Apart from privacy concerns, data is analysed to generate increased sales and to direct individual and collective school of thought. Data is also, simply, sold.

Having an advertisement chasing you over different websites and online services is a manifestation of this mesh. If in doubt, consult the business models of search engines and social networks for an example. For other remarkable use cases, check the numerous information intelligence projects in several countries all around the world to monitor, direct and affect individual and collective opinions. No single for-profit company makes its infrastructure, manpower and all what makes it a business in the first place available for free. Considering the amount of investment and turnover of data-intensive businesses, it is easily understood that when something is free then you are the product.

However, you and I, the users, are only active in the data life-cycle model, as we produce and consume information, but we are passive in the revenue model. We do not get our share rather only a convenience factor as well as sometimes an added value, such as cost reduction and time saving at the cost of our identity being used and, in many cases, abused. Consult the history of corporate handling of personal data. This is where things become interesting. Moreover, uses of this data mesh do not stop at the commercial level, governments and organisations around the world find this data mesh to be a crystal ball to different ends. The other facet of the coin, is a huge network of data beneficiaries.

What is Digital Identity?

The technical definition of digital identity is a dry terse yet an expressive one. According to the ISO/IEC 24760-1:2011 standard, digital identity is “[the] set of attributes related to an entity”. Talking of identity refers to individualistic traits, attributes and possibly behaviour of an individual, organisation, a device or any generic entity. You and I are such entities. Digital identities are not mere collective behavioural profiles for classification and targeting purposes but rather specific information attributed to a single entity or person. Digital identities are linked to identifying information, such as, official identity documents, e.g., passports, social security numbers or national IDs, or weaker forms of identification, such as phone numbers, email addresses and mobile or computer identifying information. Digital identities facilitate automating businesses, clustering people into a set of profiles, targeting, experimentation, marketing, banking, politics and an endless host of businesses.

In brief, our digital identities allow for personally identifying us, building knowledge about us regardless of our approval, monetising us as products whether we approve or not and whether we benefit from it or not.

Those billions of social posts revealing information about each user and about connected users together with cross-site tracking technologies, online searches and resolving domain name records allow data beneficiaries to make billions as well as build interfaces on top of information that they control and through which they control our access to information. This cyclic path only leads to nourish the gatekeepers’ influence and authority. You certainly owe your Internet service provider the bill for providing Internet access for you. But I doubt you would easily approve your Internet service provider using each website or online service URL that you use to learn about you and monetise this knowledge to affect your opinion, consumption behaviour or track you.

What is the Concern about Digital Identity?

In social context, personal information is called personal for a reason. Nosy people harvesting your personal information are not usually very welcome. Entrusting an organisation to your personal information that can be used to affect your life is based on, well, trust. Trust can be honoured or betrayed. Against lots of money is involved without personal obligations whatsoever except for public relations niceties, the stakes are high. Corporate history teaches us a hard lesson, intentions - if sincere - and goals can change as easily as changing decision makers, financial positions and authoritative pressure. The thing about abundance is that it hardly gives any sense of individuality. In many regards, our digital identities may almost be considered a livestock for revenue generation.

Incidents of password harvesting, user location harvesting even when explicitly disabled, harvesting user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising, sharing data with third parties without consent are all so common. The irony lies in that this is done by services billions of people use every day and entrust providers behind them to behave well.

Email, the thing we all use every day, especially, those great services from a usability standpoint, are daily subject to analysis for targeting, classification and influencing purposes. Same applies to text messages.

Going to a supermarket to find goods personally priced based on your digital identity is not very nice. Let’s for a thought suppose that Jack’s shop starts doing that so that if I were less fortunate, prices are lower for me and if you are more fortunate, prices are higher for you. Depending on one’s social perspective, one could find this a just way of doing things or one could regard this as a mishap of encouraging the “unskilled”. But really it is not about Jack [1], rather it is about the house that Jack built [2]. Jack aside, how many others would start doing the same and optimise the price for the maximum you are willing to pay?

Having a targeting platform learning and acting on affecting your next purchase or how you would vote or how you would think of a social or political issue is not nice at all. Having a lending firm or a bank going through all algorithmic difficulty to have an agent reaching for you with an irresistible credit offer is good in its own right, however, this assumes very rational behaviour on your part as well as on the lender’s part with the thousands of clients they handle. Rationality, however strongly assumed, is not always there. The repeated economic crises, especially that of 2008, serve as good examples of loss of rationality.

This swap of convenience, ease and possibly added value in exchange of control over one’s own decisions is a bargain. What do we really bargain for?

Moreover, if our personal data is so valuable, why do we only provide it and not monetise it ourselves? Who owns this data?

The ramifications of digital identity go far and wide. The notion of fake news, what is regarded fake news and who regards it as such, whether it is factual or biased and how to combat fake news all intersect with digital identity. Identity-based censorship, segregating and cutting off parts of the Internet and numerous other hot topics today are closely related to digital identity. Nonetheless, we will not cover this intersection here for the sake of brevity. As time permits, we will cover these topics in laters articles. Keep an eye on the Atomflow Blog, follow Atomflow on Twitter @atomflow_ai and Telegram @atomflow to get new articles and other materials.

Middleman and the Censorship Machine

Data in its own right is of limited use, for instance, it can be used as a dictionary for look up through a simple database. However, together with the appropriate algorithms to process it, constant updates, re-processing and evolving algorithms for better processing, data takes a dangerous new dimension. Moreover, the notion of information interfaces and information filters becomes very relevant.

Both the everyday life person and technically sophisticated person resort to gateways to access information. When a website is eliminated from a search engine or even de-ranked, it becomes remarkably more difficult for this website to gain mainstream public exposure. To have an idea about it, look for the number of companies and the number of tools to increase a website’s or an online service’s search engine rank, i.e. search engine optimisation, SEO, in order to have public online exposure. It is a good business. SEO market size in USD dollars reached USD 65 billion in 2016 exceeding earlier predictions by three folds. It is expected to hit USD 79 billion in 2020. This only tells how important the role of search engines to mediate and dispense information has become.

Social networks meant to ease and propagate communication proved to affect users’ psychological states as well as opinions. They are put to real uses for shaping user’s school of thought and purchase decisions. Here, as well, look for the number of companies and tools whose business is built on online social presence and social media.

The following are a few pointers:

• Impact of Social Influence in E-commerce Decision Making — by Young Ae Kim and Jaideep Srivastava
• Latent Agents in Networks: Estimation and Pricing — by Baris Ata, Alexandre Belloni, Ozan Candogan
• On Social Networking and Mental Health — by Igor Pantic
• Benign Envy, Social Media, and Culture — by Jiao Wu and Mark Strite.

These are only two use cases of information filters. There are many others. Consider if your banking experience, your transactions and your purchase history are put to this kind of information processing. Even without identifying information, this is simply dangerous as it can be easily used to gain insights, shape collective behaviour and institute various controls. Combined with digital identity, the effect descends down to the individual.

Privacy on the Blockchain Pseudonymity or pseudo-anonymity is the sort of anonymity most mainstream blockchains offer. The word pseudonymity is derived from the word pseudonym, which according to the Cambridge dictionary means “a name someone uses instead of their real name, especially on a written work”, i.e. an alias. That is, a pseudonym or a wallet address on a blockchain precisely denotes a single entity or a single person, however, the real identity of the person is concealed. Comes the interesting news, algorithms have been developed to identify entities based on blockchain transaction histories with pseudonymous identities. Moreover, if an information leak takes place at any part of the chain of events, then the whole notion of pseudonymity is compromised. For more details, check Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain by Marc Jourdan, Sebastien Blandin, Laura Wynter and Pralhad Deshpande. It is not to suggest that the current data mesh is any better than blockchain technology, rather blockchain is a small step in the right direction, however, in and by itself cannot solve the problem and when abused can, in fact, complicates the problem. The next part of this article will address this topic in more details to discuss how Atomflow handles this topic in a radically different way.

More generally, online presence of an individual, entity, article, a book, etc., is subject to information interfaces which are often controlled by those who have the most thorough information about both the consumers and the producers of information. It turns out that the Information Age beginning with a promise of freedom to access information and ease of communication may well have descended into a global information control and censorship machine. In brief, there are middlemen who strongly affect and more often than not restrict information.

The next part discusses how Atomflow approaches digital identity.

[1] Jack is a Cornish and an English literature hero who does not appear to be witty but rather foolish and lazy, nonetheless, triumphs through cleverness. Jack may correspond to the Russian Ivan the Fool or to Djuha in Egypt, the Arab world, Turkey and Iran.

[2] The house that Jack built refers to the British rhyme This Is the House That Jack Built, the rhyme is neither about Jack nor the house, rather it is about everything being connected.