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Self-Sovereign Identities, The Next Step in Privacy-First User Experience

Self-Sovereign Identities, The Next Step in Privacy-First User Experience
divya
Tue, 03/21/2023 – 06:10

There is a growing momentum around Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) with real value to be captured by individuals, countries, and businesses. When privacy is at stake, SSI puts individuals back in control of their personal data. Moreover, it helps organizations to operate in an environment they trust and control to significantly reduce Know Your Customer (KYC) and GDPR costs and to more easily comply with regional privacy rules while improving user experience.

Identity is evolving in the changing global business environment

Although privacy regulations are constantly changing, businesses are still responsible for protecting employee and customer information. Doing so is much easier said than done. Organizations have an average of 17 apps to process or store customer data, and ensuring compliance across each of those apps is a complex task. If you also consider that the US hosts 92% of the western world’s data and the laws there often conflict with European regulations, the data protection task at hand compounds in complexity exponentially.

The most crucial concern is that a small number of large technology companies control massive amounts of data about their users. And with so many users and so much information, the policies and actions of this small number of large tech companies can have a significant influence.

So, these privacy concerns gave birth to the concept of digital sovereignty, defined by The World Economic Forum as “the ability to have control over your own digital destiny – the data, hardware and software that you rely on and create.”

Digital sovereignty includes two key pillars: data sovereignty and technological sovereignty.