This episode, we define identity, and we’re thrilled to get some help from a very special guest. Dr. Geoffrey Goodell is a senior research associate in the financial computing and analytics group at the department of computer science at University College London. Furthermore, Dr. Goodell is the lead researcher at the Peer Social Foundation, our non-profit partner focused on education, research and open-source initiatives aimed at decentralizing identity and access for people, business and government.
What exactly is identity?
This episode, we define identity, and we’re thrilled to get some help from a very special guest. Dr. Geoffrey Goodell is a senior research associate in the financial computing and analytics group at the department of computer science at University College London. Furthermore, Dr. Goodell is the lead researcher at the Peer Social Foundation, our non-profit partner focused on education, research and open-source initiatives aimed at decentralizing identity and access for people, business and government.
What exactly is identity?
Henry: Hey everyone. It's Henry, Mike and Chris of Decentralization Education. No Decentralization Education is our short 10 to 15 minutes segment where we explain technology terms and topics that we've often referenced during a regular podcast that decentralist. This episode, we are going to define identity, but we've got a very special guest to help us. Dr. Geoffrey Goodell, Geoffrey is Senior Research Associate in the Financial Computing and Analytics Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College of London. He is Convener of the ISO working group on foundations of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies and an academic advisor to the Belgium based International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications and the Blockchain for Europe Association. Furthermore, Dr. Goodell is lead researcher at the Peer Social Foundation, our nonprofit partner focused on education research and open-source initiatives, aiming to decentralize digital identity and access for people, business and government. Welcome Geoffrey.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Thank you, Henry. It's good to be here.
Henry: Well, you're a bit of an expert in a few of these things. So, let's start with the most fundamental question I can think of, what is identity?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Well, this is a really big philosophical question and philosophers have debated the concept of identity over many thousands of years, and this is nothing new, it has concepts in mathematics and logic that are also very closely related. But I think that what we're really talking about is, identity in the context of interactions between persons or between organizations and so on. And, I'd like to draw your attention to the ISO 24760 definition of identity, which is a set of attributes related to an entity.
Henry Mike: That's very interesting, very simple.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yes, a set of attributes related to an entity. Now we know what an entity is; it could be a person, it could be an organization, it could be a legal entity of some kind, and we know what attributes are ---attributes are characteristics. Now, they might be transactions, they might be features on, but ultimately this is what we're talking about; we're talking about something that is bound to that entity, and by the way, the entity could also be, something other than a person or group of people, it could be an animal, it could be a machine. This notion of entity is potentially quite broad and is generally quite broad in the ISO parlance as well.
Mike: So, Geoffrey, let me ask you a question. Who determines what the attributes are?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: That's a very good question and I think that what's really important in this definition is to answer that question is the word set. And here we have this idea that really what an identity is, it's really a set of attributes, right? So, a single attribute, is not an identity. So, a single attribute might be that person who took that trip on the tube last Tuesday at 13:10, or it might be something that is, six feet tall or something like this. These would be attributes, but they don't become an identity until they're bound together into a set, and this set performs this binding.
Mike: Right!
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Now, what happens here in this concept of what the entity is really, this recognition of an entity as being the same as some other entity. This concept of entity resolution which is of course the business of firms like Palantir. So, they see sets of attributes in one context and sets of attributes in a different context. And they make judgments about whether the entity in one context is the same as the entity in another context, based upon the attributes. So, imagine a database doing an inner join on these different attributes to see if they match and if there's a match, then we might declare the identity of the person in one context to be the same as the identity of the person in another context, and therefore conclude that they are the same person.
Mike: So, what you're talking about here is, you're starting and it's not just because you said Palantir, but what you're talking about here Geoffrey sounds like what Snowden was talking about when he did his rep, he's kind of expose on the NSA was this idea that, people like Palantir; their job is to scan social media profiles and internet, browsing history and all of that metadata that we're sending out there. And then to your point in the backend, they match it up and say, this over here is a bunch of search history from a certain entity, shall we say, and this is a bunch of social history from a certain entity, and this is a bunch of say other history from a certain entity. And we can use an algorithm to say, we can reasonably assume that they're the same entity.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yes, we can statistically deduce it and yes, this deduction is statistical in the sense that there might potentially be multiple people who share a certain set of features. But we can imagine that there are some kinds of features that are very hard to duplicate, for example, your passport number. Yes, you might have two passports, but it's pretty hard for people to have four passports. And, we might imagine that it could be something like a mobile phone number, where it's relatively easy for persons to have multiple phone numbers, but they tend not to anyway.
Mike: Right.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Can still be a very powerful identifier and certainly if we have this kind of binding between, these sorts of identifiers, we can build a very powerful sort of constellation of linked elements, which together form what we might call a very rich identity.
Henry: Yes, so therefore, Geoffrey, is there a difference, or are we also talking about digital identity?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: well, I think it doesn't matter whether it's digital or not, explicitly. But this idea that we've linked these particular attributes together, that's what makes it, an identity. And if you can determine statistically that if you can uniquely identify someone from some set of attributes, then the identity is perhaps sufficiently rich to, to be something that could potentially be used to build a profile about a person. It could potentially be used to establish a reputation, both positive or negative, associated with the person and so on.
Henry: Okay right. Thank you.
Mike: Okay. So, what it sounds like to me, Geoffrey is, one of the things I haven't heard in this discussion so far is the role of the individual who is the identity, right? So, you're basically talking about is the ISO defines identity as a set of characteristics----characteristics that can be linked together.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yes.
Mike: To form an identity, for an entity. Okay. So, a person, a business, a cat. And so, what you're talking about now, is this idea of linking attributes into an identity. And I know that you've talked before about this, about linking identities and linking these attributes. What's the danger of this definition of identity, not being something that is in the hands of the person who actually is the identity?
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yeah. So, this is a bit of a challenge with this definition of identity and honestly, these questions of identity are the sort that have plagued the discussion about what it means for an identity to be the same. And, certainly people who are philosophers may have read about philosophy might be familiar with the ship of Theseus problem, which is a scenario in which a Theseus, of course, being a great Greek sailor happens to have a ship. And over time, this ship wears out as he's using it. He has to replace a sail here, a plank there, the bow on Tuesday and the crew quarters on Thursday and so on. And, eventually the ship that he's got that he has been sailing with throughout time turns out to be built of completely different components than the ones that he had started with. Is this the same ship or not? And then the extended version as well, if suppose that one of his crew men had secretly reconstructed a ship out of the discarded parts, that he had replaced, would that ship be the ship of Theseus? Well, these are the kinds of questions that we might ask. Now, one of the problems that I have with this idea of set of attributes related to an entity is that this implies a certain universality, of this notion of what the entity is in question. And just as with the ship of Theseus, we don't really know that we're referring to the same entity or not based upon these attributes. So, what is it really that we're describing?
Mike: Right.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: And I would suggest that what we're missing in this ISO definition is this notion of perspective. So, from one person's perspective, in one context, these two entities might be the same, but they might not necessarily be the same, and I think that this is really the crux of this, where we're trying to make judgements about an entity, and we're trying to pin down this entity for everyone to see. But there's something that's not quite right, about doing this, which is that if I'm implying that the, Mike Charlotte, that I know happens to be the same as the Mike Charlotte that, you know, then we might actually wind up with a scenario in which I can start to manipulate this conversation around Mike Charlotte.
Mike: Right.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Maybe I want to blacklist on him for some reason and maybe I want to assert certain things based upon my knowledge of him, and so on. And ultimately this power comes from this idea that this entity can be observed by multiple parties, and the trouble with linkage is that it enables this kind of a reference point to be relatively strongly tethered, to a person. Whereas if I say, well, I know Mike Charlotte and you might, and someone else might happen to know someone named Mike Charlotte, there might be a question of binding. It might be a different person that he thinks I'm talking about, but when I reveal information about, Mike Charlotte such as his passport number or his mobile phone number or so on, the we can recognize that it's actually the same person that we're talking about, and we can recognize so relatively strongly, and that recognition forms the basis of profiling, and the ability for people to share information about third parties. And that becomes the challenge for individuals with their records being linked. If I give the same mobile phone number to four different restaurants, and they all happen to share information about the person who has that mobile phone number then eventually they make certain judgements like, oh, this person is a no-show sometimes, or this person leaves terrible tips or something like that. And that knowledge can be accumulated, without the consent of the person in question. And indeed, can be accumulated to against the purposes and interests of the person.
Mike: Wow. So basically, what you're saying is, we have identity, which in one context, is who I am, or any specific entity insert I here. Okay. Who that person is actually defined as a set of attributes that other people or other entities assign to that I, in this equation. So, the identity is not so much about who I think I am it's about who others assert that I am.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Yes. I would say that.
Mike: So, it sounds like this is a good segue to another episode on self-sovereign identity.
Henry: Exactly!
Mike: That's the way I think about identity Jeffery, and I'd be interested to talk to you again about self-sovereign identity.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Absolutely.
Henry: Fantastic. Thank you very much, gentlemen, based on that, let's talk about self-sovereign identity. Another time you absolutely got me thinking, Dr. Goodell, I thought I knew what I did. He was a heck of a lot more than I expected. Thank you so much.
Dr. Geoffrey Goodell: Thanks Henry. Pleasure to be here.
Mike: Thank you, Henry.