Solid protocol restores digital agency

Summary

How Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your knowledge or consent. It’s both redundant and inconsistent. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragmented digital profiles that often contain contradictory or logically impossible information. Each serves its own purpose, yet there is no central override and control to serve you—as the identity owner. We’re used to the massive security failures resulting from all of this data under the control of so many different entities. Years of privacy breaches have resulted in a multitude of laws—in US states, in the EU, elsewhere—and calls for even more stringent protections. But while these laws attempt to protect data confidentiality, there is nothing to protect data integrity. In this context, data integrity refers to its accuracy, consistency, and reliability…throughout its lifecycle. It means ensuring that data is not only accurately recorded but also remains logically consistent across systems, is up-to-date, and can be verified as authentic. When data lacks integrity, it can contain contradictions, errors, or outdated information—problems that can have serious real-world consequences. Without data integrity, someone could classify you as a teenager while simultaneously attributing to you three teenage children: a biological impossibility. What’s worse, you have no visibility into the data profiles assigned to your identity, no mechanism to correct errors, and no authoritative way to update your information across all platforms where it resides. Integrity breaches don’t get the same attention that confidentiality breaches do, but the picture isn’t pretty. A 2017 write-up in The Atlantic found error rates excee...