In this video, we look at the five problems with identifiers. There's one big one and four others stemming from it, and we know of several identity projects in the blockchain space that are working to solve all of them. The first problem is the biggest, the need for some overarching identifier like a birth certificate. Before we can get an identifier like a social security number or a driver's license, we usually have to show some original record of our existence with our name, our birth date, and so on. It's often a birth certificate, created and verified by a licensed hospital or a licensed midwife. Any copies of this certificate must be notarized to be acceptable as an official record, but getting a birth certificate is actually no small feat. UNICEF estimates a quarter of all births go unrecorded worldwide, and not getting a birth certificate can have life shattering consequences. Children without birth certificates can have trouble getting an education or health care, without proof of their age, these kids might be married off too young or forced into labor, or sent into the military. Children are the second most common victims of human trafficking after women. Having no birth certificates makes them more vulnerable and much harder to track down or place in a safe home. Adults with no birth certificates might not be able to inherit property or vote in elections or even work. They may have trouble getting passports, getting jobs, getting bank accounts. The World Bank estimates 1.5 billion people on the planet lack some original proof of existence and that complicates being able to claim refugee status. That's the challenge Syrian refugees have faced. So, it's causing real human suffering around the world and we need to take action now. Identity is so important, the United Nations has made it one of their Sustainable Development Goals. Participating countries have committed to give every person some legal identification by the year 2030. The World Bank has an initiative called Identification for Development. It's designed to help more people take part in the global economy. Yet, there are problems we think with this mass approach, take India, for example. India has made considerable progress getting everyone an ID. This ID is called an Aadhaar, meaning foundation in Hindi. It's a 12-digit ID for every resident. India documented 99 percent of adults and that's having a positive economic effect. The problem was storing all the demographic and biometric data in a centralized database. The system was hacked and one billion records were exposed. So, the reality of a centrally sourced and government sanctioned identity is a big problem. That's the first major problem. The second problem is government identifiers are systems-centric, system-controlled, and vulnerable to cancellation, to forgery and even theft. A system administrator can freeze access or change the terms of use or delete our identifiers altogether. This is true of student IDs, healthcare insurance IDs, land titles and more. Third, all the personal data we create with each identifier is stored in somebody else's central database. Our college transcripts are stored in some big university database. Our medical histories are stored in a hospital database and possibly a health insurance database, all at the mercy of a central system administrator. That person or that institution may give our data to untrustworthy vendors or sell our data to unacceptable third parties without our permission or even our knowledge. In the meantime, our data keeps flowing to these databases out of our control. Fourth, this identifier-centric system is extremely user unfriendly. We have to repeat the registration process whenever we get a new identifier and we provide the same forms of ID. We keep portfolios of ID numbers, usernames, passwords and the answers to personal questions like what's the name of your first pet? If we want to switch colleges or countries, we have to port our data from one system to the next, sometimes for a fee. Porting data is complicated and the rules often change. Finally, whenever the central database is hacked, we're left to clean up the mess. We bear most of the risk for our own data but we get none of the rewards of third party data usage. What's wrong with this picture or just about everything. Consider what happened to Anthem, the largest US health insurer. Its database was breached in 2015. It exposed nearly 80 million people's personal information. Anthem settled a class action lawsuit for $115 million, and then it was hacked again and another 18,000 personal records were exposed. This is not identity management, this is identifier whack-a-mole. Our identities should be informing how we manage our identifiers. Instead, these identifiers are deforming our identities. If we don't have them, we get the message, you aren't equal in society and you don't belong and that's terrible. We can't get a bank account, a loan, or even attend college. But if we do have them, we're told to watch our backs, we're told violation of our privacy is a risk of taking part. We're told privacy is overrated and we're told that other people can use this data for their own economic benefit. Against the defeatist slogans becomes a means of manipulating us, grooming us ultimately for what could be authoritarian rule. There has to be a better way. Well, there is and we'll talk about it in the next lesson.
