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

The People Problem: How Demographics Decide the Future of the Internet

October 21, 2025 • 12 mins
I've been having an intellectually fascinating time diving into Internet fragmentation and how it is shaped by supply chains more than protocols. There’s another bottleneck ahead, though, one that’s even harder to reroute: people. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires human talent that builds systems and sets standards.
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Why Tech Supply Chains, Not Protocols, Set the Limits on AI and the Internet

October 14, 2025 • 15 mins
I had one of those chance airplane conversations recently—the kind that sticks in your mind longer than the flight itself. My seatmate was reading a book about artificial intelligence, and at one point they described the idea of an “infinitely growing AI.” I couldn’t help but giggle a bit.
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The End of the Global Internet

October 7, 2025 • 16 mins
Many people reading this post grew up believing and expecting in a single, borderless Internet: a vast network of networks that let us talk, share, and build without arbitrary walls. I like that model, probably because I am a globalist, but I don't think that's where the world is heading.
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Delegation and Consent: Who Actually Benefits?

September 30, 2025 • 11 mins
When not distracted by AI (which, you have to admit, is very distracting) I’ve been thinking a lot about delegation in digital identity. We have the tools that allow administrators or individuals grant specific permissions to applications and service.  In theory, it’s a clean model.
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Pirates, Librarians, and Standards Development

September 23, 2025 • 7 mins
With the right motivation, even I will write a blog post on a dare. And the dare I got was to write a post about what librarians and pirate captains have in common, and why it matters for standards development. (If you can’t have fun when writing, what’s the point?)
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Who Really Pays When AI Agents Run Wild? Incentives, Identity, and the Hidden Bill

September 16, 2025 • 11 mins
Google recently gave us something we’ve been waiting on for years: hard numbers on how much energy an AI prompt uses. According to their report, the median Gemini prompt consumes just 0.24 watt-hours of electricity — roughly running a microwave for a second — along with some drops of water for cooling.
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AI Permissions vs. Human Permissions: What Really Changes?

September 9, 2025 • 10 mins
We’ve been talking about identity and access for people for decades (millennia if you think outside tech). Policies, role assignments, reviews, zero trust — these are familiar tools. The assumptions that go into them, however, don't quite work when the "user" is no longer a person." Enter in the AI Agent.
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Roads, Robots, and Responsibility: Why Agentic AI Needs Identity Infrastructure

September 2, 2025 • 12 mins
We don’t spend much time thinking about the roads we drive on—until one cracks, collapses, or dumps us somewhere we didn’t mean to be. Identity in the age of agentic AI? Same deal. It’s infrastructure. Like a good road, it needs to be ready for traffic we can’t imagine.
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Bot or Not? Why Incentives Matter More Than Identity

August 26, 2025 • 9 mins
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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Working Group Chair Skills: Standards Work Isn’t Just for Coders

August 19, 2025 • 13 mins
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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Agentic AI in the Open Standards Community: Standards Work or Just Hype?

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).
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Not Just a Technical Problem: Why Fighting Disinformation Needs Resilient Infrastructure

August 5, 2025 • 10 mins
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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What WSIS+20 Taught Me About Digital Identity and Global Governance

July 29, 2025 • 11 mins
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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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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