What is Digital Identity all about?

Professor Jon Crowcroft

• 2 March 2026, 18:00 – 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre

Upcoming event Booking Recommended In-person Lecture Lent Term

• Event cost: Free
• Disabled access?: Yes
• Booking required: No

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Overview

We have many forms of identity, whether socially constructed (kinship, personas, relationships), or issued via organisations (employers, banks, clubs, government). These identities can be partly stored as a digital twin (e.g. by recording biometric information plus some identifier/number, and then possibly linked to other information credentials or entitlements - e.g. citizenship, age, health, finance, educational records and so on).

These digital ecosystems can be designed to allow us to control (access to) such data, or they can be part of state and commercial surveillance. The trustworthiness of such ecosystems is highly questionable. I'll walk through alternative designs and give examples of benefits and disadvantages, including threats (fake id, denial of service etc).

In this talk, I'll also outline challenges, including future problems like the mutability of allegedly unique and persistent biometrics like iris or even DNA, and speculate about the possibility of reflecting social structures properly in designs to create more fair and resilient systems that might be more acceptable than many deployed or proposed today. 
 

Biography

Professor Jon Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Lab, at the University of Cambridge, and researcher at the The Alan Turing Institute.

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