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PODCAST

A Digital Identity Digest

Heather Flanagan

Welcome to A Digital Identity Digest, brought to you by Heather Flanagan of Spherical Cow Consulting. Here, we explore the evolving world of digital identity on the web. This podcast is spearheaded by Heather"s expertise, where she breaks down complex concepts, shares the latest trends, and provides insightful analyses in online identity management. Join Heather as she navigates this dynamic digital pasture, delivering content that"s both informative and engaging for tech enthusiasts, digital

technology tech news

All Episodes

00:09:35

Bot or Not? Why Incentives Matter More Than Identity

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/08/26

Let’s start with a confession: I love bots. Or at least, I love the idea of them. They’re efficient, tireless, and, if designed well, can be downright helpful. (They can also be downright unhelpful, but that's a topic for a different blog post.) But the incentives around bot traffic are completely out of balance, and that makes things messy.

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00:13:35

Working Group Chair Skills: Standards Work Isn’t Just...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/08/19

This one’s for everyone who’s ever said, "I’m not technical enough to participate in standards development."If you’ve wondered what working group chair skills actually matter, I have news for you: you don’t need to be a spec-writing wizard to be effective. I do get it, though.

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00:12:37

Agentic AI in the Open Standards Community: Standards...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/08/12

If you want to follow what's happening in AI, it helps to know where the conversations are happening. That doesn't just mean the headlines and white papers; it means the standards bodies, working groups, and protocol discussions shaping the infrastructure AI systems will have to live with (and live inside).

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00:10:36

Not Just a Technical Problem: Why Fighting...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/08/05

Disinformation. Misinformation. Malinformation. These terms get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. That distinction matters when designing resilient infrastructure that supports trust. Most of our efforts to address these problems focus on content, activities like fact-checking, moderation, and takedown requests.

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00:11:24

What WSIS+20 Taught Me About Digital Identity and...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/07/29

I went to Geneva to understand what, if anything, people were saying regarding digital identity and standards in a governance-focused forum. My brain is now full. I adore the topic of identity and the standards development process; everything from the brilliant minds, the challenges, and the intense edge cases.

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00:08:46

Kill the Wallet? Rethinking the Metaphors Behind...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/07/22

Much like "the cloud" or "the superhighway", the metaphor of a "wallet" has become convenient shorthand for a tangle of technical, policy, and usability decisions. As we keep building out digital identity ecosystems with verifiable credentials, identity wallets, and cross-jurisdictional trust models, I ask: is the metaphor still helping us?

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00:11:33

Local Flavors, Global Reach: Why Digital Identity...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/07/15

What do you think of when someone says "digital identity"? Biometrics? Login credentials? A string of JSON data? Your social media account? The answer probably depends on where you are, how old you are, and/or how tech-savvy you are.

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00:10:14

When Verification Calls Home: Three Views on Privacy,...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/07/08

There’s been renewed attention lately on mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and the ISO/IEC specification that defines them. One of the more surprising aspects of the specification is that it allows the entity verifying a credential to contact the issuer directly in real time, a capability known as "phone home."

en-US

00:11:33

Resilience Isn’t Free: What Standards Can (and Can’t)...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/07/01

Resilience is on my list of the top ten buzzwords of the year. Whether we’re looking at geopolitical turmoil, AI disruption, or yet another IdP outage, it’s clear that the infrastructure we’ve relied on for decades is straining under new (and not-so-new) pressures.

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00:12:59

Rethinking Digital Identity: What ARE Open Standards?

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/06/24

Since I wrote last week about MCP and the need for a more structured standards development process, this week I feel like diving into what it means to build an open standard. Unfortunately, "open standard" is a term that often gets thrown around and means entirely too many different things.

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00:10:02

The MCP Bandwagon

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/06/17

MCP is 'an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs.' If we’re moving toward a world where AIs are expected to do All The Things, interfacing with our applications and services, then having a universal adapter that lets AIs talk to everything is undeniably powerful.

en-US

00:12:03

Delegation in a Multi-Actor World: It’s Not Just...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/06/10

Once upon a time, digital systems were built around a beautifully simple idea: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. That model worked, for some value of "worked." Mostly, it was good enough to solve 80% of the use cases.

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00:12:18

Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/06/03

Most digital systems were built around a simple model: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. If you need more than that, that's what password sharing is for, right? (Note: that was sarcasm.) Who needs delegation? Reality, which has definitely included sharing passwords, has always been messier.

en-US

00:11:23

Why Governance Decides If Decentralization Works

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/05/27

The tech is ready for decentralization. The governance is not. This is the final post in a four-part series exploring decentralization not as a buzzword, but as a series of hard tradeoffs that digital infrastructure teams, architects, and strategy leads must navigate.

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00:09:41

Redefining Success: Centralization as a Feature or a...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/05/20

What if centralized dominance is just what success looks like in our current system? Today, I want to take a step back and ask: Why is it so hard to justify decentralization in the first place? What are we really rewarding when we call a system “successful”?

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00:12:33

The Cost of Decentralization: What Companies Need to...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/05/13

It’s easy to say you want more control over your systems. But the cost of decentralization in money, complexity, and overhead can hit hard when the invoice arrives. This week, we’re taking that one step further: If flexibility or even malleability is the goal, how much are you willing to pay for it?

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0:00

Engineering Meets Economics: Shifting, Not Choosing,...

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/05/07

What if the real innovation is not centralization vs decentralization, but the ability to shift between them? It stops being about camps or philosophies—centralized vs decentralized—and starts being about resilience. Adaptability. Survivability. Malleability. The real stuff that makes or breaks systems under pressure.

en-US

00:01:26

Trailer

A Digital Identity Digest ·

2025/05/06

Welcome to A Digital Identity Digest, an audio companion to my weekly blog. This podcast provides summaries of timely identity policy, AI, and internet topics, about what’s changing and why it matters. Thank you for listening. Join me each week for new episodes.

en-US

38 results

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