Users' perspective on the usefulness of self-sovereign identity: An explorative approach

Abstract

In a society where the role of digitalization, convenience, ease, and speed, along with the awareness of data protection, and hyper-connection grow significantly more every day, one should expect conflicts between the readiness to combine - and therefore expose - one's physical identity with a digital twin. Most e-Businesses or mobile businesses rely on their customers' digital identity data. On the other hand, social media platforms and many online portals allow and tolerate fake, multiple, or non-verified digital identities. It is crucial for a business to know their customers and have reliable, up-to-date, and accurate customer information. Examples of such information include name, addresses, gender, civil status, billing or favorite payment systems, and many more. Physical identities and (verified) digital identities appear to be differently assimilated by companies. The creation of the internet without an identity layer (Cameron, 2005) has led to a mistrustful and unaware society as digital identities not only lead to new (cyber) risks and threats but also provide new insights towards one's physical identity and private data. Identity providers struggle to build a safe bridge between the online world and reality. Therefore, several attempts to digitize analogic identity verifications such as digital signatures, face recognition, etc., have emerged to enable a bypass solution without generating significant acceptance. With the popularity of bitcoin and the blockchain technology, a new user-centered identity system concept has emerged. The concept of self-sovereign identity (SSI) brings a massive paradigm shift in identity management. With a self-sovereign identity system, the user intends to have the full control of his identification data and manage his digital wallet (set of data) by himself....