When it was first launched, India’s identity project faced stiff opposition. Fifteen years later, it looks like the dystopia we were assured would befall us has not come to pass. To the contrary, there is widespread acknowledgement that in an increasingly online world, digital identity is a necessity.
The open source sustainability crisis refers to the fact that many of the foundational open source applications on which all of us depend are maintained by small teams of volunteers in their spare time. Since the DPGs are also open source, do we run the risk of facing a similar challenge as we build DPI solutions using them?
As anyone who lives in India knows, it is really hard to get aroundon your own. Our addressing system is broken and while GPS gets you to vicinity of where you need to be no trip is complete without making a phone call to navigate the last mile. We need a better system. And we might just have got one.
We built technology systems to enable data portability only to realise that system-to-system integration is a non-trivial lift. A far simpler solution is to create self-custodial verifiable credentials that are capable of being verified without relying on their issuers.
The climate consensus is rapidly unravelling. With the developing world consistently failing to make the level of commitment required to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, we need to think differently about achieving sustainable development. Could we apply DPI Thinking to this problem?
The introduction of the term Consent Manager in the Digital Personal Data Protection Act gave rise to considerable speculation. No other data protection law had anything like it, and the law itself was unclear as to what role these entities played. Now that the Rules are with us, things are a little clearer.
There is an urgent need to re-design our energy grid to take better advantage of all that digital has to offer. A recent paper describes how we can add a digital layer to existing infrastructure and use this digital energy grid to unlock greater efficiencies. But in order to realise this goal we will need a shift in our regulatory mindset.
It has been over a year since we started to deploy DPI across the globe and it has not been easy. Despite global endorsements and multilateral commitments, actual deployment is hard. But looking back it is quite remarkable how much we have actually managed to achieve.
Brazil has developed a rural environmental registry to encourage agriculturalists to follow sustainable land use policies and promote environmental preservation. If transformed into a DPI it can provide other countries a useful tool that, with some adaptation, they can use to meet their own environmental targets.
The Account Aggregator system has implemented most data protection principles directly into code. With one exception - use limitation. A recent paper offers a technical solution to this problem through sharding and confidential multiparty compute.
