From Self-Sovereign Identity to Fiduciary Identity: A Journey Towards Greater User Privacy and Usability

Abstract

The talk critically examines the Self-Sovereign Identity paradigm, discussing its contributions, its practical limitations and the challenges of adopting it in institutional, regulatory and large scale settings. From that analysis it presents Fiduciary Identity as an evolution of existing models, grounded in the notions of responsibility, duty of care and the asymmetry of power between issuers, providers and identity holders. The work proposes a conceptual repositioning of digital identity, stressing the need for governance structures, institutional trust and explicit legal guarantees, especially where public services, critical infrastructure and the authentication of automated agents are involved. The contribution is to bring technical, legal and ethical aspects together into a conceptual basis for digital identity models that are more robust, auditable and aligned with the public interest.