Microsoft Corp. today revealed plans to use blockchain technology to solve online management issues with personal data and identity management.

The building of the platform is being done as part of Microsoft’s commitment to the ID2020 alliance, a global public-private partnership dedicated to aiding the 1.1 billion people around the world who lack any legal form of identity. Microsoft plans to leverage its existing blockchain technology to assist in delivering ID2020’s goal of a usable, global identity management system.

“There is so much more we can do to empower everyone,” Ankur Patel, project manager for the Microsoft Identity Division, wrote in a blog post. “We aspire to a world where the billions of people living today with no reliable ID can finally realize the dreams we all share like educating our children, improving our quality of life, or starting a business.”

As part of delivering the vision, Patel explained, Microsoft believes that it “is essential for individuals to own and control all elements of their digital identity.” The way there, he said, is through a “secure encrypted digital hub where they can store their identity data and easily control access to it,” a “kind of self-sovereign digital identity” that “is bigger than any one company or organization.”

A lot of the post talks about the noble goals behind such a platform, with Patel saying that Microsoft would be experimenting with decentralized identities by adding support for them into the existing Microsoft Authenticator app.

Concepts around centralized identity management are not new. While Microsoft’s goals here sound great, Forbes noted that “longer term, this may be a play from Microsoft in the decentralized Internet space where they’re offering themselves as a company that will not build their financial future around spying on their user base, which is effectively what is seen from the likes of Google and Facebook.”

Image: Marc Pletinckx/Wikimedia Commons