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!
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- Update frequency
- every 7 days
- Average duration
- 11 minutes
- Episodes
- 20
- Years Active
- 2025
AI Permissions vs. Human Permissions: What Really Changes?
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 …
00:10:38 |
Tue 09 Sep 2025
Roads, Robots, and Responsibility: Why Agentic AI Needs Identity Infrastructure
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 infrastructur…
00:12:22 |
Tue 02 Sep 2025
Bot or Not? Why Incentives Matter More Than Identity
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, …
00:09:35 |
Tue 26 Aug 2025
Working Group Chair Skills: Standards Work Isn’t Just for Coders
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: y…
00:13:35 |
Tue 19 Aug 2025
Agentic AI in the Open Standards Community: Standards Work or Just Hype?
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 gro…
00:12:37 |
Tue 12 Aug 2025
Not Just a Technical Problem: Why Fighting Disinformation Needs Resilient Infrastructure
Disinformation. Misinformation. Malinformation. These terms get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. That distinction matters when designing resilient infrastructure that supports tr…
00:10:36 |
Tue 05 Aug 2025
What WSIS+20 Taught Me About Digital Identity and Global Governance
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 th…
00:11:24 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
Kill the Wallet? Rethinking the Metaphors Behind Digital Identity
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 ide…
00:08:46 |
Tue 22 Jul 2025
Local Flavors, Global Reach: Why Digital Identity Needs Cultural Context
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 a…
00:11:33 |
Tue 15 Jul 2025
When Verification Calls Home: Three Views on Privacy, Risk, and Digital Credentials
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…
00:10:14 |
Tue 08 Jul 2025
Resilience Isn’t Free: What Standards Can (and Can’t) Prepare Us For
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…
00:11:33 |
Tue 01 Jul 2025
Delegation in a Multi-Actor World: It’s Not Just OAuth Anymore
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 enoug…
00:12:03 |
Fri 27 Jun 2025
Rethinking Digital Identity: What ARE Open Standards?
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 sta…
00:12:59 |
Tue 24 Jun 2025
The MCP Bandwagon
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…
00:10:02 |
Tue 17 Jun 2025
Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and Messy Reality
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.…
00:12:18 |
Tue 03 Jun 2025
Why Governance Decides If Decentralization Works
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 digita…
00:11:23 |
Tue 27 May 2025
Redefining Success: Centralization as a Feature or a Failure?
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 …
00:09:41 |
Tue 20 May 2025
The Cost of Decentralization: What Companies Need to Weigh Before They Commit
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 s…
00:12:33 |
Tue 13 May 2025
Engineering Meets Economics: Shifting, Not Choosing, Between Centralized and Decentralized
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 …
00:11:34 |
Wed 07 May 2025
Trailer
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 matter…
00:01:26 |
Tue 06 May 2025
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