All right, welcome to the digital identity podcast. I am Terry join me here is been on Carlos from their R&D team at sulky and all of us are soft keys. So let's do some introductions. So first off then who are you and what do you do? Hey guys, I'm Ben. I work in R&D at sulky and basically we're doing work around like, you know digital identity like Chain Solutions decentralization and you know a few other things here and there to help along some of the projects that we have nice and how about you Carlos? Hey guys, I work with been on the research and development department.I meant so we are in charge of all investigations behind platform that we're building the whole digital identity as a general topic and technologies that can serve our purpose pretty much oriented towards smart contract development. That's that has been my role so far cool. So let's start off because we had a lot of Buzz words there. So let's show it digital identity first. What is this mean because I think a lot of people when I think of myself, my name is Terry. But what is my digital identity mean? Like, how do you guys see this? Like, what's your take on this Carlos? I guess we can like introduce a more General concept of identity, which is a social construct of how others perceive you as an entity. And how did how does a group differentiate you or an individual from from the rest? Right? So we're used to this concept of identity in let's say the real world in digital world in the internet. You also need mechanisms to prove who you are or to identify. This with it within a group so digital identities. It's quite an old concept. I would dare to say it as old as the internet itself since there are users interacting Behind these all these technology. It's like the saying goes on the internet. No one knows your dog. You don't know who you're talking to. You know, who are you are you interacting with? So there's this necessity of authentication and proof of identity. So these efforts of stablishing these Technologies is platforms as He's been around they have been around for a while. And he's also different use cases of a nanny like say you're playing Fortnight. You would have a game named but you're buying something on eBay. It would be a nickname but it would be a real identity and a credit card behind that to right. So what are some other types of data that we leave online as a footprint bed. There's obviously been a bit more of a push towards like towards privacy and be more conscious of that. But even in spite of that like any kind of interaction that you're doing online, you know you leaving some Behind still right if you're going to go buy stuff, you know, maybe like it's it could be tracking every product that you look at. You know, I'm them what category it's in could be taking stuff like like your IP address you Mac address, you know, like user agent data stuff like that. So and then you know, I can take all of these things and build a profile whether or not it's like associated with like your actual name, like, you know, you could still be technically in like an anonymous session or something, right? But, you know, it could still build up a profile about you as a user, you know, and what Are you doing when you're interested in and then like when you get into stuff where you're registering, you know as yourself can be everything right few if any of you use a password manager, right? You could look through the list of your password manager of all the different accounts that you have and think about like Okay. So this guy, what do they have? What do they have? What do they have what I have and now if you could put all of that data together, I mean you'd have a really clear picture of you know, who that person is what they like what they do with their into with their habits are you know, all kinds of information here. I think even like a big marketing thing. We do you feel like I said like ad targeting like what have so what I someone liked on Facebook maybe on Instagram and then that shows you what they're interested in even like browsing history shopping Habits Like location history. I think the next level that would I think most people I don't care about like they're browsing history like yeah, you see ads but it's not as if it's not as intrusive a say like your medical data or like DNA test where it's like specifically about you. Yeah things that could could cross over into the realm of like like All security, right? So like your address your phone number stuff like that. Like you say medical records, you know, there are things that in a sense could be weaponized kind of against you if that makes any sense. I think they call this doxing right on social media where yeah, so if you don't know what the icing is, basically if you're behind like a username on Twitter means someone finding out like a real home address phone number and then like sharing that with the world use because of some outrageous thing. They want you to get the taxes and that's like that's like that. It's identity-based right because it's who you are and who you're presenting yourself online. And you know, sometimes we like to be anonymous like in a video game. We're not going to use a real name with our address right but when it comes to like tuck in your doctor stuff, you need to user one important thing about identities that it's always contextual like it's always linked to a specific context. So it is how participants in in some specific context can refer to you or interact with you. So it's Acting in reality. We have like different identities. We sort of we're used to think of identity as like your real name and that kind of so to speak real world stuff. But like in your eBay profile you have a reputation that's part of your identity and it's granted by the community. It's not even always as how you present yourself. That's that might be a part that is how Community perceives you is a crucial part of identity. There's this concept of there's no single identity. You're supposed to be able to To present yourself in different manners depending on the context and disclose relevant information in each context and that's all the ongoing work and digital identities trying to achieve the sort of privacy and control give control to the user how much they want to disclose about themselves depending on the context depending on who are you interacting with even if they get our space and like the cryptocurrencies like how many fake accounts where they're of likes easy at finance and people like saying, you know send me ethos its identity problem to right? Even if he gets verified the people that'll get like ones that kind of look like as handle on Twitter Instagram and like you know, who's to say you're the real one and he's not the fake one. That's why they have these verified tags. Well, I got fooled the other day actually by on Twitter. There was a fake Donald Trump won right? And you know how well because they use the use the same picture right? And then I was on mobile and it it cut off the end of the username like the other hand. Also it said at real Donald Trump, but But I didn't say don't real doctor and said at real Donald true or something, right and then dot dot dot is just something that you know is like it was the dot dot dot because it was like the moment when you click on it and then you should see the end of the it's like real Donald Trump or something like yeah, so I had one similar where I followed the real CZ from Finance on Instagram. And then a fake one followed me back and then I was like, oh it's easy for me. I was like no way. This is not the same guy then it was one of those like scam like Austin you eat or something, but it's white the right because after I follow him you can set some monitoring thing to like follow you back that's really smart because there's tools that can automate that stuff. There's social media automation is is pretty crazy. Right? My second story was I was a victim of this Bitcoin password thing where they're like, we're like, In got hacked a couple years ago and then they got it was password and I got this email with my password that I used to use a lot in the subject line is how that you know by now we've had on the got your attention, you know, we've been looking at your webcam and we have all these pictures of you is send this to bitcoin to this address and I was like, okay. Okay, that's weird and like one my camera is always covered up. So you just possibly not like, you know what I'm gonna mess with this guy. I'm like, so send me the private key so I can prove that you actually own this account, but you never replied. Yeah. Like it's because I want to study hard and I'm sending it to an address that you actually own obviously exactly. Right and it's so interesting because the edges to give you you can add it to the Explorer right at the black settings for I'm just sealing didn't actually send anything in there. And so that's kinda interesting that gave himself not is empty. I could lie to you. I'm sure or maybe they just made a specific address for each person and they can generate sounds like a lot of work exactly but it is interesting because one I saw the password in my mind. I kind of like startled me look like I'm serious in this like it's kind of spooky a little bit. So I guess it goes down like that identity theft like there's different levels. I like you sure. Like my Instagram gets hacked. Yeah, it would suck but it's not like life-threatening was like if I won password or last class got hacked I could be really devastating. That would be real Annoying. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, all right. So let's move on to talk about identity system. So we talked about kind of what identity is how the constructs of who we are online and how we have like account at Spotify. Uber Google Facebook, you know, you don't know any of this but what is the current state of say the traditional in Sao Carlos? I know like what's involved in identity transaction. I know there's three parties. I want you go over this real quick. Well, even in real world scene spot from the idea that identity is something that someone grunts you it's a social construct. So for instance that passport and a driver lasting license, that's not your identity, but that's kind of it is a claim we can call it a claim government or an institution makes during your persona. So it stating that you are able to drive for example that you have certain a certain name. So there's this concept of claims digital identity Community is trying to let's say translate that to the digital world making use of a cryptography to make verifiable claims points that three actors in this system would be clay me sure someone who makes a claim about someone about something there's a claim subject which is usually the identity owner and there's the also the relying party which Of people that make use of that information. So one brief example would be someone proving their age their over 21 in a bar in order to purchase alcohol you show your driver license for instance. So you are the identity owner very fine yourself some attribute of yourself through a claim or credential we might call a credential more fitting in this context, which is a driver license. There's an issuer of that credential but it's institution the government And there's a relying party which is the the bar owner or the bar. I don't know Hauser book. Whoever is in charge of checking that that information. So we always have this three parties interacting in the identity world. There's a credential issuer. There's an identity owner. There's a relying party. So more or less all the scenarios for identity consists of this these three and even we think about like using your Facebook or Google account to login to another site. It's the same transaction like your Facebook is even you the claim of your email and address and then the relying party could be like some app that's using the oauth and you're the owner that's using that to the difference here is that there's no identity owner per se like speaking about self sovereignty. There's no the user and it's kind of the crucial aspect of all this is that the user is not in charge the it's not in control. It's not the owner. So it's really we all know that Facebook owns all the data we might refer to Identity. As such as a subject as a claim subject, the word owner doesn't really fit in this case because the user doesn't own anything. That's kind of what we're trying to solve with decentralized identity and self Sovereign identity put the control back to the actual subject the actual owner, right because right now every system of identity is pretty much siloed. I can you talk a little bit more about this event. Well, I mean if you talk about the data ownership again and using these third parties for authentication, it is actually kind of industry. Because it does go back a lot to using your email address. I think your email address is is used extensively as part of a syndication and identification online. Right? But for most people they don't even know their email address. I mean, they use like a like a Google service or or Microsoft or Yahoo, or whatever right you some some third party email service, you know in a way like a lot of times you'll have to require proof that you manage that email. Is like, you know through you know, they'll do some kind of like to factor. Well, it's not really to factor. But you know, they send you an e-mail and you to click the link in the email, right? So, I mean, if you lose control of your email address, you could lose control of you know, dozens of accounts that are linked to that right? So that's that's actually a serious problem. If you think about it, you know, if your email gets compromised and like, you know, somebody somebody either hacks it and change this password or or maybe Google or Yahoo decides that you've broken their terms of service and they shut down. Accessor something like that, right then all of a sudden like you have this like sort of cascading effect where all of these other accounts are all of a sudden inaccessible and like you and I don't know what but the language policy on this podcast is but you are something yeah. She was a journalist. I read couple years ago two years ago. He was victim of an SMS which show The Simpsons whopping. Yeah, right. So talk about those bits. Do you know how this works? Yeah, that's so that stuff. So so basically what they do is like it's a and Engineering hack and basically they'll call in to like your mobile provider and I have to convince them that they are you and then they'll say that they want to Port the the phone number over to a different provider. So let's say let's say you on AT&T and like they call into AT&T and they're like, okay. I want to Port my phone number to T-Mobile right? And then they've already got like an account set up on T-Mobile and they've got a SIM card right? Once they have that phone number ported over to the new SIM card and then they have access to it. Then they can get the SMS alerts that are associated. Gated with like your to factor these accounts or whatever then like. Yeah, that's it. Like, you know you're done. So that's that's actually very very scary and I think an article I read within like two hours. He was locked out of everything and he was like a cascading thing where he saw his like some SMS notification in the his emails only got like a notice that is locked out and he couldn't login after and I think that's what scares at once they shut that down and you lose access to that and like one by one like dominoes kind of start falling to and it's actually probably not that Hard to steal like convinced you're someone with all the footprints they have online now. Well, that's just it to I mean they say there's another kind of high-profile social engineering hack that happened a few years ago. This was a guy named Matt Honan who at the time he was a writer at wired, but I think now he's at BuzzFeed. But basically these guys they they did the same thing, but they called in to Apple and they they got Apple to like reset his Apple ID, and then they use that to just take over everything. So right, you know, so once they That Apple ID apparently like this the way that he had things set up it was connected to you know, everything else, right? So it was it was tough because they deleted like photos of his like kids and stuff like off of like iCloud in or whatever. Right? Like, you know, it was rough but not he wrote about how that happened in in great detail actually was quite well and also your Apple ID can disable other devices. That's right. That's why he say like it was happening like to him in real time. He's like looking at his iPad and all of a sudden it's like what's happening, right, you know. Go to laptop like, you know problems, right? Yeah, like one thing is that we cannot fully avoid the in any system to be actual points of failure that I mean wherever there's control. There is the risk of losing control. So it's kind of hard to mitigate these risks for someone to I don't know lose their email or someone getting their password and controlling things for an individual's identity, but it is quite another thing for someone to hack big database. Millions of identities and that's that's kind of what's been going on for a while since we have all these multiple silos around each user creating their own personas and replicating their data among different service providers. What we're doing is pushing into the edges. In this case. It's the identity owners the users so still the owner and there must be some education like the owner has to be careful about their means of control Their Manners of minimizing the risks and such as this two-factor authentication and also, Art's of recovery mechanisms, but in the end the user I always have to be responsible of their data and we cannot avoid that one thing that it's quite interesting about all these like using cryptography to prove identity is the concept of selective disclosure. Also more technical speaking zero knowledge proof without entering much detail. The essence of it is that you can prove to someone that some calculation was done and the calculation was correct without revealing the Actual parameters of the calculation so in case of might want to prove classic example, you want to prove you're over 21. So in reward you show your driver license, so there's all sorts of non relevant information being disclosed in that case. So, it's your name and your actual age point is that with the proper means of selective disclosure of zero knowledge you can you can prove to someone like cryptographically you can prove that you are over 21, for example without even reveal Being your actual age that's quite interesting because it allows a level of control that so far. We haven't had in any identity mechanism View and that is something that technology such as blockchain and a proper cryptography can can can solve. Yeah, we'll go into how that works later in a future episode. That's kind of very technical but I think going back to the control aspect you talked about is that the more centralized control you have the more attractive the target is to kind of either a lose the data or get high cause you're gonna get crypto exchange that has what 200 million Rebellion like the more it gets the more attractive is tax hack because in also like if you own the data yourself, well, then, you know, you're going to hack what 10,000 people one by one as I make any sense another way to sort of focus on like the mitigation of these risks is around a biometric identification as well too. And that's something that we'll talk a lot more about later on but you know, just just to give you one example, but these guys are calling in doing like The Sims swaps or like the one where they called it the Apple there. A few things. I mean you can have like approved phone numbers that you could call in from but also for example the bank that I guess I have accounts with whatever they have a thing now where you just call in and start talking and they do a voice recognition over the phone. And then yeah, you're done you have 10K so they're not doing like any of those like personal information questions or anything like that anymore. You just start talking and then like yet you Kate you are authenticated and so it goes I guess it's taking like all of like the recordings or whatever of like all the times. I phoned in and stuff and like plugging that To some kind of like, you know Ki mechanism. Yes. Oh that is so stuff like that is pretty interesting. So and then we'll get into more biometric stuff like, you know with the facial recognition and the you know that ya know kinda be dependent on how good that AI is that comparing to both of the two right? I've always wondered to it's like could you just like stick like like a recording of someone's voice but I think the other thing that sort of and this is like more specifically around social engineering attacks is that because the authentication is happening while you're on the line with like a customer service. Agent so like if your voice like just like started changing or like it seemed like a bit dodgy like, you know, there's also you know a human Tok lower. Yeah top loader on the other end you can you know use their judgment. I guess, you know, this he like OK this is a bit weird. Yeah because I saw in Adobe demo of like the new addition I think and basically they had someone the presenter like read two sentences and then later he just like typed it. That is said in his voice. Nothing. Well, that is so scary. Yeah that adobe could do that with today. I know because I guess if you're a I could analyze a voice it probably could reverse-engineer it and like Tech right so it's kind of scary. But yeah, I guess the iriscan is one of the most reliable so far mechanism for biometric validation, but you can't just put a picture of the eye, you know, like like, okay, I'll take a picture of I print it out like you know, what if someone can like genetically clone II to and then that becomes scary. Oh, yeah, that's like Yeah, alright cool. So let's move on to the next thing we hear so let's talk about technology and your freedom. This is something that we talked about internally before I think Carlos we talked about using Technology For Freedom the right way the wrong way. So what do you want to start off with this one of the main goals of cryptography, for example, it has been going on he's to protect data is to protect their users protect things. There's these Vibe of libertarianism to to name it in certain way that is technology being used for freedom, and I guess it's pretty a consensus already that thing. The cryptocurrency can work in in favor of freedom for the users. So in this case has some level of Financial Freedom and digital identity can work towards offering freedom to their users about their identity their attributes. There are their data, but certainly when there is the desire to control one specific Authority a party to control others, it becomes possible to use technology in the opposite direction. So So some governments playing high level biometric recognition mechanisms Technologies to affect the behavior and and the perception of the population. Yeah, that's that's pretty scary. All the things that can be done when technology see in the hands of someone. So I guess that's where the whole concept of decentralisation comes which is to mitigate in danger of having anyone too much control over especially over others many Certain things are happening seeing the coming of this blockchain technology and and and many people talking about decentralization, which was not a common thing to hear about before because we were used to thinking of this authorities big parties establishing what we can do and what we cannot sew something still. I think quite undervalued such as cryptocurrency allows you to do things that you couldn't do before quick example would be the very fact of Of owning I mean if you do it properly and you own your private keys and you manage your crypto, it's common saying that you're your own bank. I was living in Venezuela. I didn't have a bank account that I could receive foreign currency and Bitcoin allowed me to have anyone send me money. Like we were saying me an email that changes like it can it can be life-changing for some money. It was in my case that I could just work for a company overseas. So it's that putting Back to each individual is quite a powerful tool of the whole decentralization movement. Was that a restriction by the government on your bank to not receive overseas funds or what was the cause of that? Yeah. There are all sorts of restrictions in case of Venezuela for a while financially and in other aspects, but financially there's a currency exchange control like the government dictates. What what's the exchange rate which is quite an unreal Exchange. Right, not the real one people use. So in theory, I could have received US dollars but the amount of money I would be losing it's ridiculous. So it is just not feasible. When there are these kind of restrictions so using crypto was simple manner legal to just get my money and and not be limited. But that kind of thing that kind of barrier. Yeah, it's censorship proof. Essentially. I remember when we met up in December one of our colleagues in Brazil was saying if he wired money to himself In his own name there would be like an extra tax on that like that just blew my mind. That is so insane housing because like because like in the u.s. you send Wonder so you see, you know, some $5 fees here and there but like like not notice it was like a three percent tax would like five times like that's crazy specifically we do that. Yeah, all these different countries with a different sort of like Financial regulations. They're so they're so scattered. I mean like, you know one country you'll have something that's, you know, pretty reasonable and fair and then another country. I have something that's just you know, very like anti people because we enjoy we talked about the and financial and the debt tracking app in China, right? Well, why don't you talk about a little bit but so this this is we're getting back into interview freedom, I guess right and sort of how governments are working to use technology to sort of implement their ideologies or the regulations or whatever. They want to do a quick little bit of background in China. They're in lamenting something called a social social credit score. So this is different than just a credit score which is only strictly, you know financial and you know has to do with your ability to borrow money. The social credit score affects people's lives in many different ways. And so they use a carrot and stick approach. So basically if you do well and you have a high score, then you are able to take advantage of perks and little bonuses, right? And on the flip side if you have a poor score and then your Going to have a tough time because you're going to get start getting barred from like the ability to travel by airplane or the ability to travel by train. You won't be able to get a loan. You could be barred from working certain types of jobs. So it could get that they're still right and then all of a sudden, you know, you're an individual who's you kind of stuck right, you know like to the extremely interesting concept. I think I don't think it's going to end well, but yeah it is. Like I'm not level of control though that they're using technology. Well, yeah, and now we get into the the technology part of it right in one of the northern provinces. I believe in China you're doing a pilot project where they've distributed this app. Right and the app is basically it's a map with with pins on it and the pins are identifying the location of people who are who owe money, right? So there they have a debt maybe that's overdue or something. Maybe they didn't make the car payments or the Find on their cell phone or something, right? So basically the app is incentivizing people to go and spy on these other individuals who are who are in debt observe sort of like what are they up to do? They look like they're in a position to pay back their debt, right? And this is tricky because you know, let's say I'm on that I've let's say I'm behind on my car payment or something, right? And then I'm out having a having a frappuccino at Starbucks and then somebody on this app goes and sees me and they're like, whoa. Well, he's having Starbucks like he's Rich. Yeah, exactly. So he I'm going to report him right? Is that really how you want to know program your Society to behave? So that's that's that's one question. They're just sort of an a philosophical sense. But then again like you're looking at this, you know, the technology being used for kind of like centralized malicious purposes, I guess right, you know, and it goes way further from there. I mean in China you talking about the the freedom Or lack of Freedom around so the like the digital technology is right every company that operates the user database in China has to give it back door the Chinese government. It's like regulation. It is law. I'm like foreign companies have left China over this, you know, like Google and then other ones have complied like I believe Microsoft probably Apple to at this point. So yeah, I think you look like an app like we chat if you never use it for like it's basically the app to use in China where you can talk to your friends you can Do voice chat you can pay utility bill you can like, you know order gym classes with your trainer. You do like everything there but the government has a Theta so basically it's not that hard to build a credit score. It's a heavier Beach at day because pretty much everything is in there day in and day out to like you just go to a restaurant with friends. I can see where you ate something that because you're splitting the bill and we chat probably oh Yang for your actual car with that talk about like your digital footprint like we were before but like what kind of like kind of a profile you're putting together like like WeChat just like centralizes all that. You've got everything I can't imagine Facebook Google Amazon Netflix Spotify Uber. Everything isn't like one out. It's like an what 1/2 basically and that's who you are and it is who you are. I mean, it's convenient some ways, but it's also, you know scary because that's that's how they get you right? It's the the other convenience and the other thing too is like we've you go back to the carrot part of the equation too, right? I mean if you could learn good like okay, I'm paying back on those on no never saying anything bad about the Government, or you know, like I'm not doing you know anything that would like lower my supporting your score goes up and then all of a sudden it's like I'm getting discounts on hotels. I'm getting like yo discounts on this discounts on that. I'm getting the ability to like access like, you know, Financial Services like through credit that wouldn't have been able to before right? No, there's the benefit side of it as well to right so some people are just like, okay. Well, you know, I'm a person let's say, you know, I'm a Chinese citizen, you know, like a, you know, your regular regular Average Joe they're right, you know. Got like you normal normal job, you know one and a half kids or whatever. And so yeah, like maybe my game plan is just going to be like, okay. I'm going to try and do good on this social credit score thing, right, you know, and I'm just going to try and like go for the goal for the perks go for the perks, right, you know, which is the opposite of you know, the guy who just like see how the string of bad luck, you know or something right and all of a sudden now, it's just like, you know, he screwed like you can't buy a bus ticket. You're the goal also like is there a path to Redemption? Ocean from this to like, I mean, it's something we don't really have an answer to yeah in theory. At least I mean if you look at just like the credit score part of it then yeah, you could do the things that would increase your credit score. So pay back your bills on time and you know do stuff like that. But yeah, it's tough. I mean like I think what it'll happen with this system is that you're going to see some people like who are already marginalized, you know, because they're already maybe in like, you know, financial difficulty or like, you know, having trouble like, you know, Just like an integrating with Society or whatever. And and now this is just going to magnify that problem make it worse, you know, because it's going to start taking away the ability to do things and when you start doing that too much to people when you start taking too many things away you get mad and when people have are mad and have nothing to lose. Well, I mean we've seen countless examples throughout history. So yes, every time is a huge imbalance is a what famine hunger violence or something? Yeah, it all goes hand in hand, right? Forces is that they're basically gamifying the behavior. They want citizens. Yeah, the problem problem is that they're forced gamifying that you cannot decide not to participate in the game. And that's that's the scary part. I mean, it's quite normal that authorities might want to incentivize desired Behavior. Well good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior governments have been doing that all along. But this case it's I mean when you get technology in it, it's like the emerging behaviors. That that that arise from that like okay you are incentive icing people to pay their stuff. That's cool. When you do that kind of thing like you can hey, let's incentivize people who spy on their neighbors you're creating a behavior there you're creating a culture. I think I wouldn't I cannot imagine like one way of violating freedom in worse way than to violate the freedom of the whole society and future generation the freedom to develop their own culture. It's quite scary. He's very very controlling. Taking in a in an extreme way. I don't know if I might being a little bit too optimistic. But the thing is that I think the world is going in a different direction the rest of the world the majority of places. I guess the side effect of this is that you have to isolate yourself in order to serve these levels of control over Society get a like isolated Universe out of your country for that to work and that's not that's that's not going to end. Well, that's not sustainable. It's not natural. Well, that's all that's all. What's happening in China? I mean they have their own internet, right? You know, I mean, they've kicked out all the different Services. They put a big firewall around big you no control over what domains can be accessed and all that right and going back to sort of the the way that this is happening in China. It's not a result of Technology. The technology is just enabling it. This has been happening for decades and decades right like go back to like the 60s or so. They were teaching kids in school, you know to spy on their parents and report back. The stuffy so the whole like conditioning the population to spy on each other and reported back to the government that's been going on for decades, right? Yeah, but one to add like if you look at the Spectrum of technology and freedom on one side, we have the super optimistic kind of like liberal and type where like everything's decentralize you and your data those getting half but then on the other side you have kind of like China or maybe worse where it's enabling a lot of this fat stuff to happen and it's like where we'll each country fall between Because one thing that kind of worries me about blockchain Solutions is that yes, you have an address that's protected cryptographic that once, you know, someone owns this address and everything is on that as you can kind of like kind of figure out what they've done, right? Yeah, if I knew what what your ether address was that you were accepting payments to or something, right? It's probably isn't that hard if you have like a fulfillment address or something, then I can see like how many transactions I can see what your sales figures are like, you know, you know how much how much money is going in there? This year, you know being smart about it and generating a ton of like different addresses and you know, aggregating them and stuff like that covering your Footprints. Basically. Yeah. So like let's say if you have like a blockchain sort of like Payment Processing for like a like an e-commerce shop, right? Like every customer gets a different address. It's that sort of thing and then though the funds from those get like four to someone else but I mean, you could still trace it, you know, like I mean, it's it's not it's not a perfect way, you know to cover it up but you know, you can you can make it more difficult in any case but ultimately the public nature of it does lend itself, you know, you know, if you've if you get clever and like, you know, you can put together a script that's you know, going through through all the different addresses and then going back through the transaction. So let's just take a different angle then so does didd cover this if you have like an umbrella D ID and you have like 10, that is another that could you still cover Your Tracks that way even though you own a d ID or is this technically not the way Works, but I guess we would have to first like introduced for those who don't know. What a GID is it stands for decentralized identifier. So in summary the idea is that blockchain is providing the scenario where you can prove to be in control of certain crypto fonts. For example, you have a private key. So you are in control of something that is public the idea is to take that concept and to the world of identity where an individual can prove that they own and identifiers that identifies. GID so since you can prove that you're in control that identifier then some blockchain based Technologies can provide the owner with the ability to associate that that identify with public information. Ideally not personal information, but in might be I don't know crypto addresses or other cryptographic Keys, the anonymity the Privacy is one of the problems we solve especially when dealing with public information everything in a blockchain is shared by People know Gina Network. So it's quite a challenge since we're dealing with public information. Like if I know someone's Bitcoin address I can track their movements for life. It is important to be aware of what what do we want to be public and whatnot. Yeah exactly. Right cool. So let's close this out then with some new segments. So the day so this is kind of a bit old news, but we talked about this a little bit internally project outlets on Facebook recently. They were caught using VPN root access paying. Teens 20 to 30 us a month to get data. So basically what is root access Carlos Ruiz root means like the the Superuser in in in Unix systems. So basically providing total control over your device to someone if you give root access that means they can have low level access to the devices. Even Hardware like this total control even like if your chats and Cryptid like on telegram it wouldn't work because it could bypass that right. Yep, cool. So Facebook was caught spying on teens for this and basically they were using a VPN to see someone using SnapChat. They're using WhatsApp and they would do decide to kill or copy a certain application. So I think this is something interesting I came out but it's funny because the same day this came out they recorded like record earnings and I think it kind of got stuck to the rug you faster and now no one's we talking about it, but it's scary that they would go to those beans to do that and you think about what you do on your phone anybody who your messaging like whether it's your mom, you know, your wife your kids all this. Everything they have access to this at least for a teenager to so but the karaoke my hair was at it's pretty normal to do market research is just I think this level of access. Yeah, they could do market research without having to do that. I mean, that's it. I guess it's a shortcut maybe exactly. All right, so I'll leave it at that. Thanks for joining us today will catch you guys in a couple weeks next episode. We're going to talk about some more digital any topics. If you'd like to show give us a feedback ideas that stuff you had org and make sure to download the software. Off-key Vault. It's a desktop a 3M wallet. You can start building a digital idea that we've all talked about today, and then we'll see you guys soon. Thanks, Gary guys. Thanks a lot. See you later.
How many identities do you own on the internet? From your Instagram handle to online banking username, there are various constructs of your identity that form who you are. But you don't own any of them, and that presents many problems when it comes to establishing trust, protecting that information, and making sure you don't fall victim to a data breach. Show Notes 00:00 - What is this podcast about and who are we? 01:00 - The necessity for authentication on the internet. 02:30 - Types of data that can construct who you are. 05:00 - How identity is always contextually used (or misused). 09:00 - The three parties involved in every identity transaction. 12:00 - Where does centralization fail in identity services? 16:00 - What are zero-knowledge proofs and selective sharing? 20:30 - Cryptography and how it impacts individual freedom. 25:00 - Convenience and centralization: Where are the tradeoffs? 30:00 - Using technology to incentivize and force behavior 35:00 - A basic intro on decentralized identifiers (DID) 36:00 - News Segment: Project Atlas at Facebook & Root Access  To learn more about what we do and start building your self-sovereign identity, download the SelfKey Vault for Mac OS/Windows at https://www.selfkey.org/download 