This article has been written by Mr. P. Rohit a 3rd year student of Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, Visakhapatnam.
ABSTRACT
The convergence of cutting-edge technologies like identity management, blockchain, and artificial intelligence has profound effects on citizenship and other facets of society.
More privacy and security is required, especially with regard to user personal data, as evidenced by the rise in security breaches and digital spying in recent years. New laws and developments in cybersecurity should enhance data privacy. With the use of decentralized identification and other privacy methods, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies offer innovative possibilities for user data protection.
By giving consumers the means to own and manage their own data, these platforms can provide them more autonomy. Additional opportunities for boosting user and system security, augmenting data sets, and bolstering enhanced analytical models are presented by artificial intelligence.
AI models play a vital role in recognizing and preventing identity theft by studying transaction patterns, user activity, and other pertinent data. Potential anomalies or suspicious activity can be found using machine learning algorithms, which gives the digital identity management system early alerts and effective fraud prevention measures.
INTRODUCTION
The concept of citizenship will probably change dramatically because of emerging technologies. The distinctions between digital and physical, local, and global, are already becoming hazier due to new technology. Blockchain technologies challenge the idea of the state and allow for the development of a decentralized “cloud citizenship.” Law enforcement agencies use AI, data mining, and machine learning to create an algorithmic identity that uses online activity to predict “digital citizenship.” Genetic advancements expand the understanding of ancestry and migration history, which has been dubbed “genetic citizenship.”
The way individuals view communities, identities, membership, and belonging will alter as a result of technological advancements. One of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century is governing emerging technologies, which mainly involves governmental, corporate, and societal initiatives that have the power to influence the responsible development and uptake of digital technology. While most people agree that these technologies are the way of the future for economic expansion, they also carry a number of serious concerns for society. To be sure, there is a lot of misunderstanding and debate among the major stakeholders over how to strike a careful balance between encouraging these breakthroughs and reducing the risks associated with them.
A policy agenda to encourage the advancement and national uptake of blockchain, artificial intelligence, and other digital technologies is generally agreed upon. On the other hand, there is also widespread consensus that these technologies exacerbate monopolies, create privacy risks, heighten inequality, jeopardize democracies, and increase false information, fraud, bias, and safety concerns.
Therefore, these concerns necessitate the implementation of regulatory measures to mitigate the adverse effects of these technologies.
THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS ON CITIZENSHIP
Citizens in the modern world face an increasing number of circumstances when they must confirm their identity to authorities and institutions. It seems that the fundamental foundation of modernity from claiming food rations in refugee camps to boarding airplanes is predicated on the notion that most individuals are able to regularly furnish some proof of who they are. This isn’t totally novel. For decades, or even centuries, several nations have been providing identity cards, passports, and driver’s licenses. On the other hand, the number of technologies used to confirm that someone is who they say they are has increased dramatically over the past years.
Nowadays, a microchip is usually included in passports, enabling automated facial recognition during immigration checks and minimizing encounters with border guards. Governments are becoming less concerned with paper or plastic wallet cards and more interested in biometric identity databases containing fingerprint, iris, and facial data. Documents and cards can be misplaced, taken, or overlooked. Fingerprints and iris are a little more permanently linked to their owners. As a result of the development and proliferation of identification technologies, an increasing number of people are gaining the capacity to authenticate themselves fast, simply, and frequently without the assistance of governments. Furthermore, an increasing number of people are learning how to authenticate themselves virtually via the internet. There are significant implications of this trend for limiting or increasing citizen participation.
IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON CITIZEN MANAGEMENT:
Decision-makers could be better informed by these new identity systems that a citizen requesting or pushing for a change is, in fact, a legitimate local citizen and not a bot or someone from another nation. Actors and citizens are aware that decision-makers are growing more dubious about the veracity of online discourse purporting to originate from actual local residents. The next generation of identity technologies will facilitate decision makers’ ability to accept that the voices they hear are relevant and human. Identity technologies will become so widely used that many governments will mandate their use during voting. This outcome might even be advantageous in systems where voter fraud is pervasive.
BLOCKCHAIN AS AN INSTRUMENT TO IMPROVE CITIZENSHIP RELATED ISSUES
Reliable recordkeeping is essential to the majority of civic involvement procedures, including participatory budgeting and general elections. It is generally accepted that an election is invalid if the votes are not accurately recorded. The public’s trust in governments will never increase if written comments from citizens are manipulated to appear positive. Online electoral voting has only been implemented in a few jurisdictions thus far. The main reason for this low level of adoption worldwide is the enduring and intense fear that bad actors may manipulate vote data and steal elections. Concerns with thorough documentation have a detrimental effect on the efficacy of citizen initiatives, which are closely related to petitions.
A blockchain is a unique and relatively new type of database designed to make historical record alteration exceedingly difficult. The Brazilian constitution grants statutory power to citizen initiatives that are signed by a significant number of individuals. In actuality, though, it has proven hard to confirm the authenticity of signatures. This barrier has been exploited on multiple occasions to deny citizens the opportunity to have an impact by dismissing citizen efforts as fraudulent. In response, a brand-new initiative has been launched to assist individuals in crafting and endorsing bills to the Brazilian legislature that are less likely to be criticized for being fraudulent. The utilization of a widely accepted type of blockchain to store data contributes to the assertion that signatures generated via the app are more reliable.
Ultimately, whether or not this combination of technologies affects public involvement and how governments respond to it will depend less on the security and quality of identity technologies than it will on blockchain. It will instead come down to perspective.
Although there may not be much progress in true security with new technologies, people may think that there has been progress. On the other hand, new technologies have the potential to erode confidence and make decision-makers doubt if public messages have been correctly transmitted. We’re only in the middle of this perception war, but one thing is certain: proponents of blockchain technology will fight hard to convince decision-makers that their solution is the path to legitimacy.
DECENTRALIZED IDENTITY OF CITIZENS
Proponents of blockchain technology frequently hold the belief that people should have sovereignty over their identities and control over what parts of them are shared with other people. This idea is known as self-sovereign identification. Decentralized identity is an embodiment of self-sovereign identification made possible by blockchain technology, which has the potential to significantly increase personal data security and privacy.
Individual ownership of personal digital data pertaining to various aspects of identification is referred to as DID. Giving the people whose data, it belongs back ownership of that data can help those people as well as the organizations that would normally be in charge of keeping it safe. People can store their own data independently of the databases of the parties they interact with thanks to blockchain technology. These people own and control the data, and references to it, or metadata, can be kept on the blockchain and used to support user claims on the accuracy of their personal information. The DID would be owned and maintained by an individual as opposed to an email service provider. The owner would also take precautions to secure the password, or private key.
The DID would be owned and maintained by an individual as opposed to an email service provider, unlike an email account. The owner would also safeguard the password, or private key. The individual could choose which details to disclose to a third party by using an identity hub. DIDs lessen the likelihood of unintended linkage. In this case, correlation refers to the ability of entities to link data about a single identity across many systems without the user’s permission. Nearly every website uses data for email addresses.
DIDs can assist users in controlling and safeguarding their data property as well as limiting who has access to it. By utilizing decentralized federated identities, blockchains can also improve user security when interacting with various online services or platforms. Blockchains enable organizations to safeguard personal information that is essential to an individual’s self-governing identity. Users of a system or group of systems typically have what is known as a “federated identity,” which is defined as a single identity that people use to access services or information platforms offered by several different parties. Single sign-on (SSO) authentication enables and determines this single identity.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PRIVACY
The term artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a broad topic that includes machine learning and cognitive computing, in which computers are trained to do cognitive tasks like learning and problem solving more quickly and accurately than humans. AI can be used to combine personal data from blockchain participants and their stakeholders in a way that preserves information security and privacy of personal data, especially when combined with alternatives for identity protection through decentralization. These procedures can improve data sets and AI models, as well as user and stakeholder security.
A subset of artificial intelligence called computational intelligence can increase the Blockchain’s resistance to attacks, enhancing system security and, eventually, the privacy of the data stored on the system. While computational intelligence is built on soft computing techniques that allow for adaptation to a variety of changing circumstances, artificial intelligence is based on hard computing techniques. Participants in blockchain technology can choose which parties to share their data with and for what purposes when they have more control over their own data. This helps to guarantee that personal data is used in ways that are compatible with the owner’s objectives by giving users “opt-in” control.
Privacy can also be safeguarded by smart contracts. Users’ permissions may be subject to intricate regulations contained in smart contracts, which have the power to impose restrictions on how the data is used and control the granting and withholding of participant data. Contracts can be scanned by AI to find parties that have or are likely to have data, or who are willing to offer it for intended uses.
The validity of the data is increased when it is clean and has well-defined metadata. Smaller data sets can yield more insights and lower error rates because each item in the set is more reliable. Artificial intelligence (AI) models will be more accurate and produce better predictions and choices when they are trained on clean data. This makes it possible to collect and handle data in a more moral manner. AI models can produce results that are actionable within predetermined ethical and regulatory bounds when they are constructed using data that has been properly collected and managed.
CONCLUSION
By improving security, privacy, and efficiency, the combination of identity management, blockchain, and artificial intelligence technologies has the potential to completely transform citizenship services. To use these technologies for the benefit of society, however, requires thoughtful preparation, moral reflection, and a dedication to inclusivity. To handle new issues and guarantee a responsible and fair deployment, continued cooperation between technology developers, legislators, and the public will be essential as these technologies advance.
Blockchain offers novel features that allow data to be shared in ways that protect individual privacy and give people authority over their own data, like decentralized identities and zero-knowledge proofs. These developments have the potential to improve cybersecurity and promote more moral usage of personal information. Blockchain users can achieve these goals by carefully creating governance structures and procedures.
Through the combination of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, there is a remarkable chance to transform digital identity management. This combination fortifies security with AI-powered biometric authentication, grants people self-sovereign identities, ensures data integrity with unchangeable audit trails, and fights identity theft with cutting-edge anti-fraud safeguards.
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