News & Stories

We are facing another war—not with an enemy that is dividing the world, but a pandemic that is uniting us. What will it mean for our future when the biggest war in recent years wasn't fought with an enemy nation but within our borders?

At ATB Ventures we spent 2020 exploring, and developing infrastructure for some of these issues including data privacy and sharing, AI ethics, and untrustworthy identity management systems. This reflection is an overview of that work.

Who is going to make the changes we so desperately need to ensure the longevity of a cleaner and safer world? Can anyone enact real change and make a positive difference on an individual level? Or are climate change and social inequality really so vast that it’s going to take the world’s largest players to make any sort of difference?

COVID-19 has forever changed our lives, but the world is finding ways to thrive in the face of adversity.

ATB mobilized the Open Identity Initiative with best in class organizations from across Alberta (and Canada) to explore identification in the age of the digital self and to encourage self-sovereign identity pilots and adoption.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a model for managing digital identities in which an individual has sole ownership and oversight over how, when and with whom their personal data is being shared. Users who subscribe to this model are able to hold and store all of their information directly on their own device and share for verification without the need of a central aggregator of data (i.e Equifax) - which tend to be highly vulnerable to theft and attack.

Each time you interact with an organization to access services or pay for goods, a large amount of personal information is shared with a variety of agents (for example driver's license, Social Insurance Numbers, emails, etc). Not only is this a cumbersome process for you, but the more information you share the greater the risk is for the security of your data.