Blue Ticks or A Proper Digital Identity System?
Blue Ticks or A Proper Digital Identity System?
If you haven’t noticed Twitter is now charging organisations around £1,140 per month for just a little blue tick:
Some organisations — such as MIT — have even made a point of saying that although they have a blue tick, they have not subscribed to the service:
To me, it feels a bit like getting charge for the creation of a digital certificate, from a key pair that you actually produce. Before Let’s Encrypt came along, digital certificate providers were asking for £50 or more for the creation of something that required very little checking, and cost a fraction of a cent to create.
What’s the alterative? Digital signing, and where we can create our own private and public key, and then can register the public key somewhere. It doesn’t involve Twitter proving our identity, and where we can store the public key on a trusted ledger.
Luckily, we have the EU blazing the way in this area, and where they have mandated that everything EU citizen will be allocated with an e-ID within the next few years. This provides citizen identity on the EBSI (European Blockchain Services Infrastructure) ledger.
But, where it comes in more important is that trusted organisations — such as public sector agencies, educational organisation, and industry — will go through an extra level of checking, and then be able to have their own key pairs which will provide their identity.
In this integrated digital world, the EBSI ledger then stores the public key for an entity, and anything which is digitally signed with their private key can then be trusted. No Twitter blue tick involved. This approach will properly integrate digital trust and identity, and move us into a new digital world, and say goodbye to our “paper-based” approaches. With EBSI, too, we also get the principle of the IDAS-2 digitial signature, and which has much more legal standing that a costly blue tick.
Conclusions
We need to move towards a digital signing infrastructure, and build a digital world which is fit for the 21st Century.
If you are interested, here’s a draft paper which outlines our work in the GLASS project: