A Newcomer's Guide to Self-Sovereign Identity

That's because the way we handle identity on the internet hasn't changed all that much in the time we've had smartphones or widespread commercial internet.

It's the promise of a censorship-resistant identity engine to fuel the digital age well into the future.

The promise of an identity protocol that can help protect users from corporate privacy violations for the rest of their lives.

The promise of a platform that humanitarian technologists might use to build identity solutions for the homeless, the oppressed and the displaced.

LifeID is the dream and the promise of an open-identity system that will deliver self-sovereign identity to billions of people and operate in perpetuity, perhaps for the rest of humanity's digital era.

For nearly two years, the LifeID team has researched, developed and built the beginnings of that dream, and it is close to delivering the very early stages of its decentralized, self-sovereign identity system.

A self-sovereign identity is an identity made up of information you, as a user, own and control.

An example of common and reusable identity information is a username and password, the identity data that you use today to log into a website or app.

The trick is making the "Yes" into a credential that the owner can own and reuse, making it so that they, and only they, can use that "Yes," and making it so that they can present that "Yes" in a way that protects their privacy and makes it very difficult for the website to gather unrelated identity information about the user unless they grant permission.

In the case of loss or theft of your DIDs, private keys or identity data, initiate recovery.