Цифровые удостоверения могут перенести доверие к государству на местные сообщества

We don’t trust social media companies to protect children, but many New Zealanders don’t particularly trust government, either. Paradoxically, a certain kind of digital identity may offer a better approach. Digital identity deserves much of the suspicion directed towards it. A system in which the Government issued a universal digital identity, recorded where it was used and gradually made it necessary for ordinary life would concentrate enormous power. But that is an argument against a particular architecture of digital identity, not against digital credentials themselves. A recent Digital Identity New Zealand survey found 77% of New Zealanders would be comfortable proving a single fact, such as being over 18, without revealing everything else about themselves. More than half said they would not use a service demanding information they considered unnecessary. There is something appealingly liberal about that principle: prove what is necessary and nothing more. But who gets to do the proving? Take the proposed social media ban. Instagram does not need to know who a 17-year-old is. It only needs to know that she is over 16. A school, for example, could provide that verification without handing over her name, address or date of birth. That opens up a third possibility beyond trusting government and large corporations: communities and civil institutions can establish trust, too. A university can verify a degree and an employer can verify employment. A professional association can confirm that someone is qualified to practise, just as an iwi can establish whakapapa (genealogy) or membership. Different institutions know different things about us. Why should any one institution need to know everything? Digital credentials could allow them to verify particular facts without any one institution controlling a person’s entire identity. The technology is new, but the principle is ancient. Human beings have always established trust through communities. Someone knew your family. A priest knew his parishioners. A bank manager knew his customers. A tradesman guarded his reputation. Modernity made many of those relationships insufficient for societies of millions of strangers. We therefore moved trust from relationships into documents, databases and large institutions. The future of digital identity therefore presents a surprisingly political question. Do we build systems in which government knows more about us because it must constantly establish who we are? Do we allow a handful of enormous corporations to perform the same function? Or can technology help us decentralise trust? The old principle of subsidiarity may offer an answer to this entirely modern problem. Subsidiarity holds that responsibility should generally rest with the smallest and closest competent institution. It is better understood not simply as a theory of small government, but as a theory of strong citizens and institutions. Applied here, the principle is simple. Where a school knows its pupils, a university its graduates and an iwi its members, why build a system in which all of those relationships must first pass through Wellington or Silicon Valley? Digital Identity New Zealand’s research illustrates how this can work in practice. Māori respondents were more than twice as likely as New Zealanders generally to express trust in Māori and iwi organisations. The researchers summarised the finding neatly: “Trust travels through relationships.” That is not just a Māori insight. We trust institutions when we believe they are close enough to know us, often because this means they are accountable enough to answer to us and limited enough to know only what they need to know. Dispersing trust and authority is part of what allows liberal democracies to flourish. The point is not that local institutions are infallible, but that power is safer when knowledge is dispersed rather than accumulated in one place. One of the defining problems facing liberal democracies is the erosion of trust. Our instinctive response is often to compensate with more control, more information and more centralisation. Turning to government or large corporations to solve that problem may only make it worse. Perhaps the better answer is not to ask one institution to know more about us, but to allow the institutions and communities that already know us to verify only what they are competent to know. That would leave governments and large corporations knowing considerably less about us. That is not a defect in the system. To me, it is one of its virtues. For most of human history, the strength of local trust was also its limitation: it did not travel very far. The village might know you, but the stranger did not. Digital credentials could change that. They could allow us to carry the trust established by the institutions closest to us without surrendering our identity to institutions furthest away. In our digital age, institutions close enough to know us need no longer be limited by distance. Local trust could travel globally. Jonathan Ayling is a strategy consultant and professional director. He is the former chief executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), an Act Party supporter and donor, and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary adviser in both Government and Opposition. Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.