Digital Identity Wallets and their Semantic Contradictions

In the fight for individual privacy against online surveillance and personal data breaches, blockchain developers often pitch encrypted wallets as solutions. Five examples from 2021 and 2022 involve Big Tech companies or large European governments. On the private side, Jack Dorsey’s Block company announced the Web5 Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) Service. Meta and Twitter added support for fictional identities – tokenised avatars or profile pictures like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, registered to Web3 wallets that putatively offer “self-sovereign ownership”. On the public side, the European Commission funded SSI wallet trials for digital diploma credentials. Germany’s federal government launched a mobile driving licence (mDL), stored in a SSI wallet. This one term, “SSI”, is associated with varying sets of technologies and ethical principles. Following complaints that “SSI” generates confusion, I offer a typology that highlights four semantic contradictions as well as a concept map to guide future research