Page 464 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2024

2024 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference

to the development of your personal identity, including your basis [22]. The voter is then concealed but the integrity of the
‘right to participate in essential economic, social, cultural process is maintained.
and leisure activities’ that underpin that identity [16].
Over time focus has moved from general policy declarations
Definitions of privacy are related to the concept of identity, to guiding frameworks such as the General Data Protection
and as such, are both fundamental to the establishment of Regulation (GDPR) and UK Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA
human rights. Privacy is about autonomy over who collects 2018), and Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (India)
and uses a person’s private information, and identity is about which are among many rules introduced by governments
autonomy over being regarded as a unique individual made aimed at protecting society from potential overreach by
up of many characteristics and historical events. The private and public sector entities. Unfortunately, these
narrative view of personal identity focuses on our ability to frameworks have in some cases been unable to limit the very
engage in storytelling and to create narratives about governments who implemented them from overstepping
ourselves and as such we need to be able to select or omit the consent mechanisms put in place to protect individuals and
information we share about ourselves as we require [17]. In society. We should also note that despite policy efforts to
the Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 16 we see empower online users regarding how they choose to share
the mirroring of UDHR A12 in regard to privacy, but it also their data, online service providers privacy policies are
specifically calls out protections for identity in Articles 8 and shown to not provide real consumer options if users want to
29 [18]. Whilst privacy and identity are closely related and engage in services [23]. Without this control at an individual
arguably feed one another, there are differences [19]. level, society remains exposed for wider risks to our
However, those differences do not detract from the argument democratic civil rights.
that by infringing upon someone’s privacy we also interfere
with their identity. Unfortunately, we see the two concepts Identity, anonymity, and policy are seen here as structural
merge as data processors argue the need to verify an ‘identity’ elements of the privacy and human rights debate which are
to be able to participate in their service offering securely, and foundational to social structure and how individuals interact
in doing so mine all characteristics of a person for the most and communicate with one another. Therefore, how we
mundane services. It is in the interest of data collectors to design communication and social connection tools such as
understand identity as that will indirectly influence our the web becomes a discussion on how those tools can and
behaviors [20] but this is a commercially driven reason to will influence society and human rights.
validate identity rather than a security reason. For us to have
moral agency, we need to have the ability, as Laceulle states, 3. IMPACT OF THE WEB
to ‘live well, with and for others, according to one’s deepest
aspirations and best capacities, as full participating members The term Web 1.0 (W1.0) and later W2.0 are considered by
of a society/community’ [17]. If this engagement is only Berners-Lee to be a misnomer that implies W2.0 was
permitted through the relinquishment of our privacy, then we something apart from W1.0, but in fact the functionality was
are not being allowed to participate in society or to realize all based on W1.0 standards and has simply been a more fully
our moral agency without threat of exclusion from that realized version of the original vision. However, post the dot-
community should we wish to withhold information. This com crash the team at O’Reilly had been looking to reassure
condition in and of itself removes the agency we need to the public that the Web was just as important as ever, and so
secure our identities. coined the phrase W2.0, not to distinguish the next phase as
a new set of technologies, but more a societal shift in
As with privacy and identity, privacy and anonymity are financial interest and support [24]. That said, there is an
related yet distinct concepts. Anonymity, a fundamental acknowledged step change of capability in this phase of
requirement in modern democratic politics, is the absence of development, whether conceptually intended or not. It sees
identifying traits or the concealment of them. Privacy on the W1.0 in its static user content consumption form, morph into
other hand is the restriction of those identifiers from the a social and collaborative user-generated content tool.
public gaze [21]. Relating anonymity to privacy has become
part of the discussion regarding civil rights and inclusivity, When considering the development of W2.0 the technical
with the concealment of hierarchizing identity markers advances are almost overshadowed by the societal impact
offering opportunities for meritocracy and to challenge the they have had. We saw commentators evangelizing about the
corporate and political power structures that jeopardize potential societal benefits of the democratization of data and
human rights. For this paper, we will not debate absence vs the redistribution of political power. Lev Grossman wrote in
restriction and the potential associated challenges to Time magazine (2006) ‘It's a story about community and
accountability but will take the position that any future collaboration on a scale never seen before […]. It's about the
ecosystem should have the ability to restrict identifiers to a many wrestling power from the few and helping one another
level of concealment appropriate to the functionality of the for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but
application being utilized. In a W3.0 ecosystem this could be also change the way the world changes. The tool that makes
supported by other technical design structures such as smart this possible is […] Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of
contracts and cryptographic hashing. For example, a voting some old software. But it's really a revolution’ [25]. At the
solution requires full concealment, but the application could heart of these references is the belief we were moving
restrict voting on a one vote per Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) knowledge from the hands of the few into the hands of the

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