Am I crazy if I am a privacy hawk, but I’m opposed to unfettered anonymity? I think people should be free to live their lives without Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant listening to private bedroom conversations. I find the surveillance economy repugnant. The Snowden revelations leave me convinced that government eavesdropping needs more constraints....Read More

Privacy gets too little emphasis from some participants in the decentralized identity movement. They claim to value confidential interactions, yet advocate that individuals create public decentralized identifiers (DIDs) on the blockchain (ignoring legal warnings about DIDs being PII). They are okay with “phone home” verifications of credentials and revocation and capabilities. They think that selective...Read More

Not all digital credential solutions are created equal – here’s what makes Evernym’s solution safe, private, and open. Some legal, public health and identity leaders have expressed concerns about building high-stakes identity tools like COVID-19 digital health certificates. They point to immature standards and predict that scrutiny by governments and consumer advocates will reveal security,...Read More

Standards compliance is a noble ideal, but by itself, it’s not going to get us to practical interop on verifiable credentials (VCs). That’s because there’s not enough agreement on which standards we’re talking about, and the ones we all like aren’t clear enough to force alignment. The W3C’s Verifiable Credential standard defines a data model,...Read More

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do verifiable credentials (VCs). The right way maximizes choices, and therefore power, for every legitimate party in the ecosystem: large and small businesses, governments, ordinary people with modest access to tech, IoT devices… The right way is safe. It produces good accountability. It stimulates a wide...Read More