Blinding Identity Taxonomy - WG - Consent & Information Sharing - Kantara Initiative
The release of the Blinding Identity Taxonomy (BIT) Initiative on September 9th (revised December 2019) has the aim of providing needed common standards to help protect the identity of any governed entity. BIT classifies 49 different elements (see the list below) which require cryptographically encoding to prevent the re-identification of any governed entity, including organisations and individuals. Some of these elements can directly identify organisations and individuals, such as a name, physical address or bank account details, and some of them can do so indirectly, such as a photo, IP address or cookie browser identifier.
While this initiative addresses some of the fundamental demands of the EU's new GDPR regulation on the storage of data, we believe the BIT initiative is relevant to all companies and not merely those which store data about EU citizens. This is why Dativa is supporting the community efforts in both Hyperledger Indy and here at Kantara. Barely a week goes by without some new story appearing about a data breach after some criminals have hacked into a database and extracted re-identifying data which they can then use in ways to negatively impact those about whom the company has stored data. With BIT in place, the now encrypted data which the thieves have will contain none of the valuable re-identifying data the hackers are desperate to obtain. Not all data require encryption, and BIT identifies which data require a cryptographic process and which do not. While any data breach is serious, if customers lose out, not only will they require compensation, they are also much less likely ever to trust the company or purchase its products or services again.
The essence of the BIT initiative is in the 49 elements that could potentially unblind the identity of a governed entity regardless of whether these are on the cloud, in local servers or anywhere else.
[Adapted from this page on Dativa https://www.dativa.com/blinding-identity-taxonomy/ whose support of the Kantara mission is gratefully acknowledged].
Files:
blinding_identity_taxonomy Dec2019.docx
blinding_identity_taxonomy Dec2019.pdf
Link from the CIS WG Blinding Identity Taxonomy: https://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/x/fxE8Bg