In a previous article, we outlined investment opportunities in companies utilizing decentralized software solutions such as blockchains.

While the number of projects in the space is growing steadily, at present these networks continue to struggle to achieve the goal stated by its pseudonymous inventor to serve as “peer-to-peer cash”.

A much greater challenge still, is the direct transfer of non-bearer financial products, as these frequently require the reliable identification, and authentication of the entities involved in the transaction - not to mention the verification of these instruments onto a peer-to-peer network utility.

The following will review the tenets essential for sustainable solutions aiming to enable peer-to-peer value transfer while addressing identity through technology.

Throughout this assessment, identity - and its digital correlation - is reviewed from a first principles, science-based perspective, necessarily ignoring philosophical or ethical considerations, further omitting legal constructs that have culminated in some jurisdictions in concepts such as

‘corporate person hood’.

The question of identity

Surprisingly, characterizations of identity intended to lend themselves to a technical analysis seem to take on a purely abstract form, ignoring aspects of anthropoid intentionality entirely.

The definition provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology provides an example echoed with slight variations by many other linguistic constructs introduced by technologists: “Identity is as a set of attributes that uniquely describe a person within a given context.”

As with most other failed linguistic efforts of clarifying the tenets of identity citing “sets of attributes” - and more often: information or data - this description lacks any reference to human-directed activity rising to a level of legal relevance. Instead, the definition merely refers to a collection of data that can be more appropriately summed up as a ‘profile’.

The latter is frequently used to target individuals with information intended to elicit a particular behavior such as the purchase of a product or service.

‘Digital Identity’ is a metaphor typically ascribed to a set of data, and/or the manipulation thereof. The correct technical term for the latter is ‘profile’.

Profiles and Profiling

Systems and companies assembling profiles are not concerned with the identity or the management thereof, but rather manipulation of human

activity for profit (“profiling”).

Specifically when combined with behavioral data this type of targeting breaches the threshold of human agency, into the sphere of behavior directed via deceptive manipulation to act in a specific manner.

Headline-making examples such as Cambridge’s Analytica’s mass manipulation of voters using user profiles harvested on Facebook’s platform should be considered just the most egregious examples of this form of social engineering.

Data of billions of internet users are assembled into individual profiles, frequently optimized to consume advertising copy. And, while this type of manipulation prompted futurist Hazel Henderson to coin the term the attention economy in 1999 (it was later popularized by Thomas Davenport in a book with the same title), thus far it has not risen to a level of awareness prompting regulators to address externalities of these social-engineering-as-a-service enterprises.

Ironically, it is the result of these manipulations in the form of human-directed activity which rises to a provable and legally relevant outcome - i.e. the purchase of goods or services. As such, the technologies that can most accurately be described as “identity management” to-date are those which harvest human attention for profit.

However, as these platforms are designed to increase shareholder value of for-profit companies posing as information providers or search engines, management functions rest almost exclusively with the systems engineers. A function which ultimately classifies its users as products to be

sold to paying clients, as such negating agency functions to the individual.

Identity can be observed as human directed activity - i.e. “attention” - in a legal sense - with agency. The latter is frequently absent in users of technology designed to direct human attention - most prevalent today in systems that blur the lines between effective advertising and social engineering.

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