Next Web
A study of the web components for the Next Web.
Who controls our identity on the web?
This research grew out of questions about privacy, centralised services, and how people represent themselves online. It explores the building blocks that could support a web with more user control over digital identity.
The study looks at authentication, public-key infrastructure, decentralised identifiers, verifiable claims, and blockchain technologies. It brings those components together as a foundation for thinking about the next generation of the web.
Written by Najib Ghadri in May 2019 at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, under the supervision of Dr. Balázs Goldschmidt.
Thoughts on privacy, digital identity, and a more sovereign web.
We are facing several problems with the internet today. Big companies like Facebook and Google hold a lot of data about us, and they are able to manipulate it without anyone noticing. Today we use a couple of web services to represent our digital identity: email addresses, a Facebook account, a LinkedIn account, Instagram account, and so on.
The problem with this is that a lot of data leaks out about us since we are connecting a lot of services to central ones. Once data has leaked it is difficult to start a new page: the services already know your personal email, they can bombard you with spam emails, sell your email address and sell your data to third parties while you are still behind the same identifications.
Today we want something new that respects our privacy and our desire for sovereignty. Besides this problem there are many others, such as the abuse of email addresses as identifiers, and spamming. Security and corruptibility of DNS is also a concern, in my opinion.
Research
Najib Ghadri (2019). A study of the web components for the Next Web. Supervised by Dr. Balázs Goldschmidt.