Live or DIE — a review of a paper on SSI's harms

The author, writing as a critic of self-sovereign identity (SSI), argues that a draft industry paper from the Trust Over IP Foundation, "Overcoming Human Harm Challenges in Digital Identity Ecosystems," fails to address SSI's harms. The critique says the paper balances harms with benefits, treating mitigations as offsets, and that it describes SSI as a socio-technical system architecture without meaningful social science input. It also argues that the paper's use of "trust technologies" and "trust layer" wrongly treats trust, a social concept, as something transmissible through technology. The author says the working group, led by Nicky Hickman, is limited by commercial bias and mono-disciplinary composition, and that the author declined an invitation to join because SSI's founding principles were not open for discussion.