The Credential Highway

As our lives move online, the world’s collective focus has turned to the threat of people’s digital trails being used against them; the specter of privacy invasion and surveillance is everywhere. 2018, for example, was the year of Cambridge Analytica, and just last week the New York Times reported again on the way China uses facial recognition to secretly profile Uigher minorities.

But let’s not forget that this abundance of new data can be used for good, too. If we, as a society, learn to take control of our information trails, we can deploy them toward transparency and access, including for the most vulnerable.

Consider how the financial inclusion sector is already relying on digital footprints to offer banking services to populations previously deemed uncreditworthy. The humanitarian sector, meanwhile, is turning to social media and cell phone location data to locate disaster survivors.

In a new report called “The Credential Highway,” New America’s Future of Property Rights program proffers a new vision for tapping into the power of digital evidence for good: providing property documents for the billions of people around the world who currently lack them. More than that, we propose that an emerging digital identity system, called self-sovereign identity (SSI), is the vehicle for doing so in a way that’s trustworthy, secure, and privacy-preserving.

Why Documentation Is Such a Problem

First, though, it’s important to add a bit of context. Every person in the world has a right to own, rent, or otherwise occupy property. And yet, based on a 33-country survey conducted by PRIndex, an estimated 43 percent of the world’s population lacks documentary proof of their property rights. In Africa, for example, 90 percent of land rights are undocumented.

Why is that?

The first culprit is access. The pieces of evidence (or “credentials”) that administrative agencies require in order to issue property documents—things like a survey plan, a notarized will, or a state-issued identity card—are often unobtainable.

For example, in Puerto Rico, where 50 percent of homes have been built informally, lawyers estimate that obtaining the survey plans and notarized forms necessary to register a property costs approximately $2,500. That’s on top of the price of purchasing a home. Consider that Puerto Rico’s median household income is $19,000 per year, and you start to see the problem.

As an even starker example: An estimated 15 million land parcels in Uganda are unregistered, and the country only has a few dozen surveyors. It would take those surveyors more than 1,000 years to finish registering Uganda’s land.

The second culprit is accuracy. All over the world, but particularly in places with customary or overlapping property rights systems, the evidence that administrative agencies accept may not fully capture the reality on the ground. In other words, there’s a gap between reality and documentation.

For example: In many countries, land documents include space for the name of only one property holder. The name written down is the head of household, usually a man. That means that the reality of women’s property ownership is never documented.

As another example: Informal property transfers (whether through inheritance or sale) result in official property records that are outdated, and don’t accurately reflect the reality on the ground.

These twin obstacles of access and accuracy prevent billions of people from getting the property documents they need to apply for loans, solve land disputes, and pass their assets on to their children.

A Better Way

Survey plans and notarized forms are far from the only evidence of property rights. In fact, our property rights are evidenced by a multitude of small, everyday events: where we sleep at night, where our mail is delivered, our relationships with our neighbors, the fact that we paid to put a new roof on our house or put a fence around the yard.

The problem, of course, is that these everyday events have historically occurred in the analog world, outside the purview of administrative agencies that provide us with property documents. But what if we found a way to harness the evidence of these small events and use them to supplement the macro credentials that administrative agencies currently accept?

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized. With the proliferation of smartphones, satellites, and social media platforms, more and more of our daily minutia leaves a data trail. When we use services like Google Maps, Facebook, MPesa and Uber, we generate evidence of where we go, what we purchase, and whom we interact with. Individually, these data points don’t mean much, but collectively they create a tapestry of evidence that can be used to prove things about ourselves—for example, our property occupancy.

Crucially—and this is where the real mental shift must occur—this new data isn’t inferior to the macro credentials that land administration agencies currently accept. In fact, we’d argue that in the aggregate this tapestry of credentials is superior because it’s more inclusive and paints a more accurate picture of reality on the ground.

Implementing Through Self-Sovereign Identity?

Tapestry credentials sound great in theory, but how do we implement them in a way that’s meaningful and secure? And how do we structure them in a standard format that administrative agencies can easily ingest?

Our team believes that an emerging digital identity system—specifically, self-sovereign identity (SSI)—is the appropriate vehicle for responsibly wrangling this wealth of new data. SSI provides the tools to join disparate pieces of evidence into a tapestry of cryptographically secure credentials that citizens can use to prove things about themselves, and access services they had previously been locked out of.

SSI allows every user to have a unique and persistent identity, which is represented to others by means of both their physical attributes (for example, biometrics) and a collection of credentials attested to by various external sources of authority (for example, location data from Google, payment history from MPesa, or log-in history from Facebook). These credentials are stored and controlled by the identity holder—typically in a digital wallet—and presented to different people for different reasons at the identity holder’s discretion. Crucially, the identity holder controls what information to present based on the environment, trust level, and type of interaction. The leading SSI solutions leverage blockchain to provide users with a persistent and secure digital identity that can’t be revoked, altered, or accessed without their explicit permission.

What Comes Next

Movements start with ideas. The success of tapestry credentials—and of SSI as the vehicle for operationalizing them—is predicated on 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. Administrative agencies must be willing to amend their documentation standards to accept new forms of evidence. And users must believe that collecting, organizing, and storing tapestry credentials is a useful and safe exercise for unlocking services.

In a way this feels inevitable.

Gatekeepers across industries are starting to show a willingness to expand rigid credential standards and accept alternative evidence of people’s qualifications. For example, our colleagues on New America’s Education Policy team recently wrote about the willingness of universities to embed third-party industry certifications into their degree programs, allowing students to count their work experience and other evidence of competency towards degrees.

And the amount of alternative evidence we have at our disposal is only increasing. The GSM Association, which represents the interests of mobile operators globally, projects that by 2025 there will be 6 billion unique mobile subscribers, with smartphones accounting for 77 percent of mobile connections. If successful, the launch of global broadband internet schemes from OneWeb, Amazon, and SpaceX will likely further increase smartphone penetration over the coming decade.

As sensor technology races ahead, industries from finance to education have begun to harness it to allow people to assert facts about themselves and reap the rights they’re entitled to but haven’t been able to access. Why shouldn’t the property rights field do the same?