Who are you?
A simple question, but one where the answer varies greatly, based on the context of who's asking and why they want to know.
In fact, understanding how others define "who we are", is critical in virtually every aspect of our lives.
Just consider how many times you have had to 'share' your username, passport, driving licence, qualifications, credit score, employment status and other personal records to a myriad of organisations.
Then think how disruptive it can be when you are not able to share these identifiers?
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Below the surface, out of sight, predatory organisations are silently collecting your 'identity snippets' to learn whether you are a parent, what sports you enjoy, your favourite colours, who you hang out with, what your shopping habits are, whether you are religious, which political parties you support, what your sexual preferences are..., to help them define what relationships they want to hold with you.
So being able to control what we share, with whom and for what purpose, is now more important than ever.
And the need to regain control is growing exponentially as cloud, IoT and machine learning start to dictate every aspect of how we live our lives.
All of which leads me to believe that the work being carried out on self-sovereign identity, will be as impactful on us, as the internet has been previously.
Here are the 17 lessons I took away from asking tech identity experts Andrew Baker (Head of EC2 Engineering at AWS), Lohen Spies (Chair of Sovrin Steward Council) and Marius Mare (CEO of Sybrin), to why we need self-sovereign identity and why it has such profound implications.
Is Self Sovereign Identity Going exponential
This is the full interview. If you prefer to jump to the specifics, the chapter links are all listed below.