Building Trust Without Visibility

Most digital services are built on an assumption that the provider needs to see the customer, their activity, or information about the interaction in order to provide the service.

Volume I asks what becomes possible when that assumption is removed.

The papers in this volume establish the architectural foundations for digital services that can operate without requiring the provider to observe identity, behaviour or the metadata created around an interaction.

For leaders considering a new platform, this creates the possibility of designing privacy, trust and data minimisation into the foundation rather than adding them later through policy, governance and compliance controls.

For organisations with existing technology and operating models, the opportunity is different. The principles provide a way to question where visibility is genuinely necessary and where it exists simply because conventional digital architectures have always made it available.

The potential implications extend beyond privacy. Holding and observing less information can change the organisation’s relationship with cyber risk, data governance, regulatory exposure, customer trust and operational responsibility.

The adoption question at the heart of Volume I is therefore simple:

What if providing a digital service no longer required seeing the person using it?

Volume I provides the architectural foundation for exploring that possibility. The individual adoption articles then examine what these principles could mean for people, leaders, existing organisations and greenfield ventures.

The underlying ICCA papers are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, allowing the ideas to be examined, challenged, adapted and developed beyond All Me.

These articles ask questions that matter to everyday users, business leaders, regulators and policymakers: