Technological change has already had a massive impact on how we approach our personal identity online and off. As our digital presence continues to evolve, we can expect more change to come.

Tracey Follows is a futurist who's thought a lot about this.

"I think people have come to the conclusion that as more and more public services are delivered digitally, and as more governments are kind of trying to morph themselves into technology platforms themselves, there are lots of meetings with nations saying they want to become digital nations," said Follows,author of The Future of You.

"If those public services have become digital, we can't just be analog people in a digitally serviced world. We need an access point to those services. And that really is going to rely on a digitization of the self. We have a digital identity, a personal identity in the physical, analogworld. We need to convert that into layers of information that can be machine readable."

Follows spoke with Spark host Nora Young about what possible future identity trends might mean down the road.

Here is part of their conversation.

This is already underway, right? I believe it's called Aadhaar, that's India's 12-digit biometrically linked digital ID system. So this is a process that's underway?

Well, that's a good point, because that is a very centralized system of digital identity, as you point out, much like the Chinese system where there is a unique identifier, and in particular with India, that is linked to a biometric. And this is the big debate:is it a centralized digital identity scheme where literally the government or big tech or private enterprises that run technology services, know your identity, and that's the way they deliver the services? Or could we have a decentralized system that is much more flat, much more peer to peer,that's based on cryptographic technology, where we as owners of selves, and owners of our digital self, have much more control over which layers of information we allow other people of institutions to see.

Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit. Because you do raise the prospect that we might end up with this very decentralized digital ID that lives on the blockchain that will give us more individual control over our identities. Can you explain a bit more how that would work?

One I would highlight is verifiable credentials, the sorts of credentials that you can keep in a digital wallet, much like you would keep a credential like a driving license, or maybe your passport or some sort of office-related passcodeor something like [it] that you might keep in your physical wallet. So it might have our age, it might have our location, our residence.

This new system of verifiable credentials would have an institution or an organization put in a proof request, and that proof request would be matched with a proof response. When these two proof requests and proof responses match, it dings and says to the organization that is requesting my verification or authentication, "yes, she's verified or authenticated."And that's done without me having to share any personal information whatsoever.

I think one of the things that people really worry about when they hear the words digital identity, is that there's going to be a lot of trackable, traceable information, so that an institution or an organization, maybe even the government, knows everywhere I've been, but that's not necessarily the case. Somebody somewhere, has got a copy of my passport, a copy of my address, and a utility bill, etc, etc. This is all over the place in the physical world, but because we don't see it, and we don't worry about it, we're not necessarily that aware. These sorts of systems, like verifiable credentials, are privacy protecting, so they're trying to circumvent that kind of data leakage, or that idea that I have lots of personal information flying around in the world that I'm not in control of.

In the book, you also explore what we might think of as the more philosophical side of identity, that as we start to spend more and more time online, we start to perform different aspects of our identities online, which I think we're certainly already starting to do. How do you think that might affect our sense of personal identity as we do this more and more?

I try and look to the future and think about, well, how will this be in the future when we have virtual reality? Will this just exacerbate where we have multiple personalities or identities that we want to express in many, many different virtual circumstances? Or will we have different avatars that we can send off to various meetings and actually end up being in three or four different meetings all at once with our three or four different avatars? So all of these possible scenarios are yet to be seen. But we can have a think about whether we think what is happening on social media will apply in virtual reality, too.

I think, I'm hoping actually, that virtual reality will quell some of the disagreement and some of the aggression that we see, certainly on some social platforms, and I'm thinking about Twitter, obviously, in particular, because as Marshall McLuhan said, "violence is a quest for identity."So when we see people being really quite aggressive and fairly obnoxious, sometimes on a social media platform, it's really a quest for identity. They're trying to overcompensate, trying to communicate themselves in an environment where we don't really have the tools to fully represent ourselves. It's just a few characters. It's just a bit of text and a strange profile picture.

In virtual reality we'll probably have haptics [touch-based functionality].We'll have a much greater sense of awareness. We'll be in a 3D, more absorbing, engaging, immersive environment. So in a sense, we'll have a much more rounded, complex, richer identity, and one hopes because of that, we won't need to overcompensate and fight for the idea of our own personal identity in these spaces.

Do you think this is going to start to become a political issue? I'm thinking of the example of the Sidewalk Labs Smart City pilot project that was being considered for a while in my hometown of Toronto. There was a lot of pushback from activists and citizens, challenging, where's the data going? Do you think we're going to start to see more politicized conversations about things like what's being done with our data, what's being done with our identity?

I really think we are, especially with the emergence of [a decentralized,blockchain-based]Web3, which is very different to a Google, Facebook, Web 2.0 world where data is all centralized and owned by those platforms, and harvested for their own commercial gain, versus a world of Web3, where I control my own data to a certain extent.

As Web3 becomes much more of a challenger, I think exactly that will happen. There will be a much more politicized conversation, because people will become aware that there is actually an alternative system. I don't think people have really considered there is much of an alternative system until now, because we've all got very used to the convenience and the frictionlessness of these sorts of services that we use as utilities day in, day out now. I think it's going to challenge what we've become used to and what we think of as the status quo.

Written by McKenna Hadley-Burke. Produced by Nora Young and Michelle Parise.Q&A has been condensed for length and clarity. To hear the full conversation with Tracey Follows, press the play button at the top of the page.

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In the future, will you own your digital self? This futurist thinks so - CBC.ca