Abstract
Various identity management solutions are emerging in different jurisdictions, with the goal of creating a unified and privacy-preserving identity management system bridging the offline with the online. Within this trend, the concept of self-sovereign identity has re-emerged. It is a concept attached to expressions of both individual autonomy and individual control (sovereignty)—an aspiration in direct relation to what blockchain is promised to bring in contemporary discourse. The paper will provide an overview of the current self-sovereign identity paradigm solutions within the technological environment that involves decentralized networks and it will trace some of the challenges it faces within the European Union especially with regards to the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR).
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Notes
- 1.
Allen, C. (2016), The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity, 25 April 2016, Life With Alacrity blog, http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html.
- 2.
Hereinafter GDPR.
- 3.
Which should not be confused with the legal concept of the data controller. It will mostly refer to the data subject, or the owner of the identity. However, in some cases, it can be a third party acting on behalf of the data subject.
- 4.
Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, ‘Opinion 1/2010 on the Concepts of “Controller” and “Processor”’ (2010), 4.
Currently, the responsible body is the European Data Protection Supervisor - EDPS.
- 5.
This Directive was replaced by the GDPR on 25 May 2018.
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Acknowledgments
The Lab has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 759681.
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Giannopoulou, A. (2020). Data Protection Compliance Challenges for Self-sovereign Identity. In: Prieto, J., Pinto, A., Das, A., Ferretti, S. (eds) Blockchain and Applications. BLOCKCHAIN 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52535-4_10
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