ADVP advocates for digital ID firms stuck between big tech and govt wallets

The Association of Digital Verification Professionals (ADVP) flies a little under the radar. The UK trade association has members who are familiar to Biometric Update’s readers; Yoti’s Julie Dawson is one of the founders, and the fold also includes TrustID, Onfido and Verify 365.

But for quite a few years, says Alan Gooden, liaison officer for the ADVP, “we were a deliberately low-key organization, with a remit just to build trust and confidence. We’d share information with government departments, we’d consult with them, and we got to be known as a body that could be trusted and that wouldn’t rock the boat.”

“We’ve built, and over a period of time have developed, a really good relationship with government departments, where we are in regular engagement with them and actually they attend our members’ meetings on a regular basis to give us updates.”

But the landscape in which the trade association and its members work has changed significantly since January 2018, when it was founded as the Association of Document Validation Professionals. When it came time to elect a new chair, the group chose David Crack. According to Gooden, Crack “was very visionary in terms of recognizing that the future of the industry is digital and that it is not about the fundamental identity of a transaction document validation but actually reusable identity.”

Crack’s firm, CDD Spotlite, started out in financial services. Then in 2019, says Crack, “we got involved with the University of Manchester and Greater Manchester Police to try and identify modern slavery within construction supply chains. A big pivot, right?”

Influenced by the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, as well as Tim Berners-Lee’s thinking on personal data stores, Crack steered his firm toward other socially oriented projects. Now, he says, “our mission as a company is around personal data sovereignty away from any one organization, and ID is the gatekeeper to that for obvious reasons.”

“In 2022, we specialize in pre-employment screening, but we also have another initiative which is aimed at trying to make reusable identity work for deprived areas, the rust belt areas of the UK, and use it to generate economic activity. And the reason for saying all of that is that we got involved with the ADVP through a twist of fate – I’ve ended up here, but that vision around personal data sovereignty is what I’m bringing to the party.”

All of which is to say, the current environment, in which digital ID is developing amid an explosion of models, formats, standards, regulations and technology, entities that differ widely in scale and objective must learn to navigate a crowded water hole.

For Crack and the ADVP under his chairmanship, the goal is to give a voice to smaller industry players that have been successfully incubated by the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA) under the banner of innovation, but are at risk of being swept aside as the tides of digital identity rise.

“The question is, are we going to get smashed between two hard things – a government identity and Google Wallets and Apple? Or is there an opportunity to create something different?” Crack says the government, having positioned its Gov.uk Wallet as an option for digital identity, may be having a bit of an “oh s%*t” moment in realizing that it’s about to stomp on the burgeoning ecosystem it helped to generate.

On the big tech side, titans like Apple and Google have the advantage of producing hardware – and of being Apple and Google: “It’s very easy for Apple and Google to bundle in type ID offerings and then build on the back of that because they’ve got the global infrastructure to roll it out.”

The first question, then, that ADVP wants to answer is, “what do we want the UK identity market and the personal data sovereignty market to look like in the UK over the next five, 10 or 15 years?”

“Traditionally what’s worked well, and what seems to have been working well with Ofdia, is that government sets the objectives and the regulatory frameworks and the markets do what markets do best, which is to innovate and come up with different ideas. You can’t out-innovate the market. So from my perspective, it’s about creating those guardrails that allow the innovation to take place and, and part and parcel of that is how do you protect that innovation from being stifled through the development of oligarchies, or government frameworks.”

In pondering his vision for the future of digital ID, Crack waxes philosophical – and expresses a much more complex conception of identity than is currently at play in most discussions about identifiers, data and biometric identity verification.

“Identity is one of those things like time,” he says. “We all think we know what time is. And then you discover it’s relative. With identity, it’s the same thing. It seems like the easiest thing is to create these international frameworks. But what does it mean to you and me and our little communities, you know, and to the disconnectedness between more deprived areas and these global rollouts?” Identity is as varied from place to place as architecture or cuisine, and it operates on a level of complexity that is both universal and hyper-local. Crack flags that, given the current political environment in the U.S., “having international American companies rolling out digital ID is not going to really solve those types of issues.”

He reiterates the core question, for both governments and for people: what do we as citizens want from our digital identity and our management of our data? “Because the only thing we know is it’s not working for us. Well okay, you come up with this idea of getting small companies to innovate – which is now at risk. So what’s your plan?”

Article Topics

ADVP  |  David Crack  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  reusable identity  |  UK