Conclusion

We have argued that SSI is the best type of digital identity system for property rights, primarily because it is a powerful system for issuing and sharing new kinds of credentials. An interesting consequence of this argument is that the ideal identity system for land administration would not be designed specifically for land administration purposes. The overwhelming majority of the credentials which we envision to be useful—for example, location data, purchase histories, or neighbor attestations—are not being created specifically for the purpose of obtaining property documentation. That’s a great thing, because it means that citizens can accede to the rights and privileges the are owed to them simply because they live their lives, and not by jumping through hoops to prove facts about themselves. It also means that citizens can use these same credentials for a variety of other purposes: for example to secure a loan, to obtain a passport, or to qualify for farm subsidies.

So how does a tapestry credential system become operational? The success of tapestry credentials is predicated upon the existence of an ecosystem of players who are willing to collect, issue, and accept these credentials.

Third parties that collect data about us—like Google, Facebook and MPesa—must be willing to issue verifiable credentials that citizens can use for their own purposes. In order for everyone to participate, there must be common, open identity standards. We also must invest in developing public infrastructure for registering and looking up identifiers, like a Domain Name System for identities.¹ The Decentralized Identity Foundation and the Sovrin Foundation have been leaders in these efforts. In addition to that public infrastructure, individual users need apps that allow them to store and share their identity information.

The system also depends upon the willingness of administrative agencies to amend their documentation standards to accept new forms of evidence. That means administrative agencies must believe that tapestry credentials are a suitable substitute for monument credentials.

On this last point, there is hope. Governments often rely on alternative forms of evidence when standard forms of evidence are unavailable. For example, the Pinheiro Principles, which govern property restitution for refugees, allow refugees to use a vast array of data to prove their property claims.² As another example, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency began accepting sworn affidavits of property ownership, in lieu of title documents, to process aid for Puerto Ricans.³

From the perspective of the land administrator, the greatest challenge is figuring out what the new rules and standards of evidence should be. It might be wise to start by accepting attestations and credentials from trusted parties like NGOs and banks. This would be a similar approach to that taken by alternative credit score systems developed in the financial inclusion field.

Another significant challenge will be distinguishing occupation from ownership. It is possible to imagine a scenario in which a long-term renter, or a squatter, can amass enough occupation-based credentials to fraudulently assert an ownership claim. This is a question administrative agencies will have to grapple with.

And finally, users must believe that collecting, organizing, and storing tapestry credentials is a useful exercise for unlocking services, and they must also be comfortable knowing that they have full control over their credentials.

The widespread adoption of SSI promises a wide range of benefits for governments, citizens, and businesses.

For the average person, the most noticeable benefit would be the convenience of no longer having to manage a bunch of different usernames and passwords. More importantly, the privacy and security features of SSI largely mitigate the risk of identity theft. Even if a person’s credentials were somehow stolen, the thief could not use them. And if the identifier used to connect to a service were to be compromised, a new one could easily be generated.

Businesses and NGOs would have to handle and store far less personally identifiable information, reducing the burden of data management and compliance. Decentralizing storage of personally identifiable information to data subjects would make massive data leaks like the 2017 Equifax hack⁴—which exposed the social security numbers, names, addresses, and birthdates of more than 140 million people—impossible. Banks could save big on Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering compliance.

SSI would also provide a new way to govern online spaces. Social media platforms could eliminate bots by requiring all users to verify that they are real people. This could be done on an automated basis by using ZKPs so that users could remain anonymous.

Governments would have access to an identity solution they could use across services without having to maintain the infrastructure or provide people with any kind of hardware. Identity documents could be issued as verifiable credentials, making them much more secure and fraud resistant. Strong biometry could allow more services, such as voting, to be accessed remotely.

Governments can encourage the growth of the tapestry credential ecosystem in several ways. One is to begin exploring the use of SSI across a variety of citizen services, from health services to voting. Anchoring SSI to important citizen services will boost user adoption and encourage more governments, businesses, and NGOs to participate. The adoption of SSI for government services should be accompanied by privacy legislation guaranteeing the rights of citizens to limit disclosure of their private data. Storing data in a privacy-preserving platform won’t help if verifiers, including government agencies, banks, and potential employers, can require people to disclose more information about themselves than is necessary. Some governments have already started screening the social media accounts of travelers at border crossings.⁵ They must not be able to make the same demand of people’s SSI wallets.

Beyond expanding access to property credentials, SSI can help build far more resilient and transparent land registries. Documents issued as digitally signed credentials kept in distributed storage would be extremely resilient and difficult to refute. If proof of property rights were to be issued in this way, it would give each property user proof that the government had acknowledged their claim at the time of issue. The destruction of the registry, or attempts by the government to corrupt the record, would not be able to destroy this evidence, which could be verified by any third party against the public key of the registry. This would make registries substantially more resistant to natural disasters and make land restitution and compensation for refugees and internally displaced persons much simpler.

The system we have described is ambitious. It depends on a paradigmatic shift in the way that administrative agencies look at property rights. And yet, it feels inevitable. Global smartphone penetration already stands at 37 percent, up from 20 percent just five years ago.⁶ The launch of global broadband internet schemes from OneWeb,⁷ Amazon,⁸ and SpaceX⁹ will likely further increase smartphone penetration over the coming decade. In recent years, industries from finance to education to health care have begun exploring new ways to allow people to assert facts about themselves and reap the rights they are entitled to but have not been able to access.¹⁰

As the world moves online, we increasingly focus on the threat of our digital trails being used against us; the specter of privacy invasion, surveillance and identity theft is everywhere. But let’s not forget that this abundance of new data can be used for good. If we learn to take control of our information trails, we can deploy them towards transparency and access, particularly for the most vulnerable.