A Digital Identity Digest

A Digital Identity Digest

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 professionals, and the curious alike. It's time to translate geek to human. Thanks for listening! SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW ON APPLE PODCASTS: https://apple.co/3RO11vy To show your support, and help others find the show, please leave me a 5-star review. LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS EPISODE: https://sphericalcowconsulting.com ————————— LET'S CONNECT ————————— LINKEDIN: https://linkedin.com/in/hlflanagan INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/sphericalcowconsulting YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/@TheDigitalCowNetwork

Episodes

Kill the Wallet? Rethinking the Metaphors Behind Digital Identity

July 22, 2025 • 8 mins
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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Local Flavors, Global Reach: Why Digital Identity Needs Cultural Context

July 15, 2025 • 11 mins
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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When Verification Calls Home: Three Views on Privacy, Risk, and Digital Credentials

July 8, 2025 • 10 mins
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."
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Resilience Isn’t Free: What Standards Can (and Can’t) Prepare Us For

July 1, 2025 • 11 mins
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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Delegation in a Multi-Actor World: It’s Not Just OAuth Anymore

June 27, 2025 • 12 mins
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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Rethinking Digital Identity: What ARE Open Standards?

June 24, 2025 • 12 mins
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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The MCP Bandwagon

June 17, 2025 • 10 mins
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.
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Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and Messy Reality

June 3, 2025 • 12 mins
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.
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Why Governance Decides If Decentralization Works

May 27, 2025 • 11 mins
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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Redefining Success: Centralization as a Feature or a Failure?

May 20, 2025 • 9 mins
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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