Hello Colleagues,

In the recent Book club meeting, we discussed an excellent book about what the future may hold for us. The book is titled; 
Gigatrends: Six Forces That Are Changing the Future for Billions by Thomas Koulopoulos and Nathaniel Palmer

One of the gigatrends, which caught my attention is How safe is our Digital identity. Most of the businesses we encounter online or offline, we need to present some sort of extrinsic identity, i.e. identity controlled by outside centralized authority, such as government issued photo-ID or Tax ID.
Often we hear news about vulnerabilities of our critical personal information in the news.

A new protocol has been presented by the authors, called sovereign self identity. Here the user controls what attributes regarding her/him self they want to share, and based on these attributes, a cryptic token is issued, which uniquely identifies a person. The attributes are verified by a trusted third part, as well as digitally signed by the user her/him self. This token is stored in blockchain or some sort of Distributed ledger to get benefits of redundancy. 

As we can see personal sensitive information is under user's control, what s/he wants to share. Only the token is presented for sake of any transaction, online or offline, hence giving the user control on PII.
In theory, this looks like a very interesting concept, which can presumably save millions in fraud and counterfeiting. But it remains to be seen.

It will be nice to get thoughts on this.

Regards