Data privacy issues have been escalating in 2020 as personal data is increasingly being used to fight COVID-19. The Linux Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium, has today announced a new data privacy project featuring dozens of cross-industry giants like Mastercard and IBM.

Called the ToIP Foundation, the new data trust coalition aims to provide a trusted exchange of data over the internet and establish a global standard to ensure digital trust.

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Specifically, the new data privacy project aims to help businesses protect and manage digital assets and data in a complex enterprise environment involving systems like the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.

To address these challenges, the ToIP Foundation plans to use digital identity models that use interoperable digital wallets and credentials and the new W3C Verifiable Credentials standard.

While various initiatives and protocols aim to solve the issue of digital privacy, some experts believe that after a decade of talk, blockchain has still failed to deliver on that account.

The problem is, it also introduces a level of trust: you’re entrusting Facebook (and companies like it) with your data. And so with this model, online identity and its contingent data is gate kept by a handful of mega-corps.

What if, instead, this process were standardized to be more private and more secure, or even disintermediated so that users hold the keys to their own data?

Blockchains have been pitched as the technological breakthrough that will make this possible. If public chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are used, the argument goes, they cannot be easily altered and are not typically controlled by a single entity. With this base layer you can create an immutable reference for a digital identity (DID); anyone who has a DID could prove ownership by referencing the record on the blockchain, and data that keeps track of which DID corresponds to which reference is stored either locally on each users device or in a third party database.

But it can only improve the situation so much. You can never remove all trust and human error entirely. This is why ToIP is also focusing on developing standards and a best practice framework, because they believe that technology is only one half of the solution; the other is in governance.

“When identity met blockchain 2 or 3 years ago, everyone thought this problem was solved, but blockchain is one end of the spectrum,” Drummond Reed, one of the founding members of the project, said over a Zoom call.

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday announced that it will host the Trust over IP Foundation, a cross-industry effort to ensure more secure data handling over the Internet.

This new foundation is an independent project enabling trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet.

The ToIP Foundation will provide a robust common standard to give people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source. The new protocol will allow them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.

The LF is pushing its sponsorship of the ToIP Foundation in order to grow membership, with global pan-industry support from leading organizations with sector-specific expertise.

Called the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, the project aims to establish a new global standard to ensure digital trust, and to provide a trusted exchange of data over the internet. Among the founding members of the new data coalition is the Canadian Province of British Columbia, as well as Mastercard, IBM and Accenture. Other members include the R3 blockchain consortium, online lending platform Kiva, the University of Arkansas, and more.

The ToIP Foundation will use Linux’s open governance model to enable a new level of digital identity and verifiable data exchange, through the advancement of technology and governance standards for digital trust. Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said in a statement:

“The ToIP Foundation has the promise to provide the digital trust layer that was missing in the original design of the Internet and to trigger a new era of human possibility. The combination of open standards and protocols, pan-industry collaboration and our neutral governance structure will support this new category of digital identity and verifiable data exchange.”

The Linux Foundation announced it will host the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, an independent project to enable trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet. The ToIP Foundation will provide a robust, common standard that gives people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source, allowing them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.
The ToIP Foundation is being developed with global, pan-industry support from leading organizations with sector-specific expertise. Founding Steering members include Accenture, BrightHive, Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, Dhiway, esatus, Evernym, Finicity, Futurewei Technologies, IBM Security, IdRamp, kiva.org, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, the Province of British Columbia and SICPA. Contributing members include DIDx, GLEIF, The Human Colossus Foundation, iRespond, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Secours.io, TNO and University of Arkansas.

On May 5, 2020, the Linux Foundation plans to announce they will be hosting the Trust over IP Foundation (ToIP), which is a project with one goal—enable the trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the internet.

This is long overdue.

Effectively, what the ToIP Foundation will do is provide a common standard to ensure data is coming from a trusted source. This standard is being developed with global pan-industry support. Founding members include Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, esatus, Evernym, The Human Colossus Foundation, IBM Security, IdRamp, kiva.org, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, Province of British Columbia, and SICPA. Contributing members include DIDx, GLEIF, iRespond, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Secours.io, TNO, and the University of Arkansas.

The Linux Foundation will host the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, an independent project “to enable trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet”. The ToIP Foundation aims to provide a common standard that gives people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source, allowing them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.

Founding Steering members of the ToIP Foundation include Accenture, Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, Dhiway, esatus, Evernym, Finicity, Futurewei Technologies, IBM Security, IdRamp, kiva.org, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, the Province of British Columbia and SICPA. Contributing members include DIDx, GLEIF, The Human Colossus Foundation, iRespond, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Secours.io, TNO and University of Arkansas.

Governments, nonprofits, and private sector firms across finance, health care, and enterprise software have teamed up with the Linux Foundation to build the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, an independent project to enable trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the internet.

The ToIP Foundation aims to establish a common standard for consumers and businesses to ensure data is coming from a trusted source. Digital identity models that leverage interoperable digital wallets and credentials in tandem the new W3C Verifiable Credentials standard will be used to address these challenges and enable consumers, businesses, and governments to better manage risk, improve digital trust, and protect all forms of identity online.

The “Trust over IP Stack” employs a dual-stack approach of technical interoperability and policy interoperability that originated out of the HyperLedger digital identity projects Indy, Aries, and Ursa. The umbrella HyperLedger open source project is focused on business applications of blockchain technology, as opposed to cryptocurrency applications.

Dhiway, India’s first Verifiable Data Exchange Platform joined the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation as a Founding Steering Committee member, to help enable trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet. The ToIP Foundation is hosted at the Linux Foundation with the goal of creating a robust common standard that gives people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source, allowing them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.

Dhiway is a startup out of Bengaluru, India. Founded by technologists with extensive experience in building open source projects which scale, Dhiway is committed to working with open standards in order to drive innovation. Dhiway builds data interchange systems and enables organizations to deploy governance frameworks to sustain these as sustainable digital assets.

When Drummond Reed, the current Executive Director of the Trust Over IP Foundation (TOIP), newly inducted into the Linux Foundation told me about the name TOIP, which John Jordan, from the British Columbia Provincial Government had coined; he was very excited. This was at Consensus 2019, last May, in New York City. It was a totally different era, we were at a coffee shop, in Midtown Manhattan, downstairs from the conference venue. A good name was one that had to fall into place, before the work that had already being going on for many years could advance. Now one year later, that project has come closer to wider adoption, creating a collaborative inside the famed open source Linux Foundation.

Today the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation with the aim of creating digital standards to enable parties to share data with trust. It’s about ensuring interoperability between different solutions for trusted data and digital identity.

The 17 founding steering committee members include Accenture, Evernym, IBM and Mastercard with contributing members such as DIDx and R3.

Motivations for forming the initiative were cited as the business challenge of managing digital assets and data as well as low consumer confidence with personal data. The combination, the group believes, is hampering the adoption of digital identity.