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

August 12, 2025 12 mins
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).
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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?
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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."
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played
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.
Mark as Played

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