This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a Cambridge Computer Science PhD topic, and is currently being worked on by Jessica Mann. It is supervised by Anil Madhavapeddy and Jon Crowcroft as part of my Personal Containers project.
Exposing individuals' digital identities to many third party services can result in data breaches and identity thefts, and yet the control offered to users on the internet through existing protocols is simply inadequate. This PhD project is exploring how to build on and improve existing digital identity protocols in order to bring more user control over the lifecycle of their identities, without dramatically increasing the complexity of the systems.
As a first step, we have are doing a survey to understand more about people's habit and experiences on their digital identities, such as their email addresses, user names, etc. Please fill this in to help us for this study, it should not take more than 10 minutes, thank you!