DID Auth: Adjust away from "identity" and "ownership" about rwot6-santabarbara HOT 4 CLOSED

I have to admit I hadn't thought about the points you raised Joe, and I definitely agree with them. That said, I think we should conform to what the DID spec says, and if this term isn't appropriate, we should discuss it there

from rwot6-santabarbara.

Thanks Joe for this feedback! I agree with you on both points..

1. I agree there are cases where owner != control. Theft is one example; guardianship is another example. Remember that in earlier versions of the DID specs, we actually had the fields "owner" and "control" in the DID document.
2. And yes of course SSI doesn't mean that you control all the claims that someone makes about you / your identifier. I've also been in discussions where people didn't realize this at first, and they thought SSI means that you can change attributes of your driver's license. @ChristopherA 's famous "Path to SSI" blog post actually explains this well (2nd principle). We just have to make sure we keep explaining it.

There are however also reasons why I think the term "identity owner" (for now) is not so bad:

1. I always found "identity owner" is a nice counterpart to the traditional industry term "identity provider". I like to say in SSI we don't have "identity providers", we only have "identity owners". That's why in the DID Auth diagrams, there are only 2 parties, whereas e.g. in a typical OIDC diagram you have 3 parties. Even though "control" may be more precise, I still think "own" comes pretty close and makes a clear point how DID Auth is different from non-SSI authentication. "Own" may suggest magic fairy dust, but I feel there's equal risk that "control" is politically not strong enough. Facebook also lets you "control" your authentication process.
2. The term "identity owner" is currently used in the DID spec itself. If we want to discuss / change it, I think we should first do it there.

Maybe we could keep the term for now, but add a section somewhere in the DID Auth paper with a quick discussion on it?

from rwot6-santabarbara.

Proposing to add the following section to the paper: #98

from rwot6-santabarbara.

Fixed by #98

from rwot6-santabarbara.