Making Data Better

The focus of computer technology historically has been on the manipulation and communication of data and information. Yes, there’s always been the monstrously obvious admonition of “garbage in, garbage out” when speaking of data. But as our dependence on data grows, the issues of data quality, of making data better, have grown in importance and complexity. Data, it turns out, is endlessly nuanced....

Dave Birch is an authority and an ambassador for identity systems. And a great conversationalist. With co-author Victoria Richardson , he’s just published Money in the Metaverse: Digital assets, online identities, spatial computing and why virtual worlds mean real business . (US link here ). In this discussion with Steve and George, Dave introduces the book and takes us into their thinking about s...

Lockstep's Steve Wilson just appeared on the NAB Digital Next podcast with host Alysia Abeyratne. NAB has kindly allowed Making Data Better to repost the podcast here. If you want to understand how to untangle the knots we’ve tied around identity and identification online, take a listen. Alysia asks important questions and Steve provides really crisp answers and explanations on: The evolution...

How do we protect data while it’s actually in use? And how can we prove it? Up until now, that’s been nearly impossible. We’ve addressed securing data in flight and at rest. When done right, they are strong protections. But what about when the data (and code is data, too) is actually in memory or being processed? And how much more complex does that become when everything is in the cloud? Confident...

In this Making Data Better episode, Steve and George discuss the multiple challenges of making better security approaches available and, critically, used by relying parties and suppliers.  This is a hugely non-trivial problem. Functional product features nearly always receive priority over basic security. IoT manufacturers compete on features and cost where even a single dollar’s worth of cryptogr...

Privacy has been a major casualty of the Internet. Twenty five years ago Silicon Valley leading light, Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy said we “have zero privacy. Get over it.” And that has been the truth ever since and the profits basis for AdTech behemoths Google, Meta, and more. The good news is that, in the quarter century since advertising became the Internet’s business model, few have gotten over it...

A key actor in risk assessment is the data provider. These commercial operations aggregate and analyze the data produced by governments, enterprises, individuals, and even other data providers. All to feed today’s insatiable appetite for understanding who it is we are dealing with online. In this Making Data Better episode, Steve and George are joined by Cindy Printer , Director, Financial Crime C...

In this quick take, Steve and George discuss the idea of a single digital ID through a review of the proposed bill currently in front of Australian legislators. We being by comparing that approach to two very different models: India's Aadhaar program and the "shadow IDs" as employed by commercial data providers.  We are excited by the steps Australia is taking to secure the online a...

Australia's online security community - government, banking, and providers - has made a major, deliberate move. Over the last year, the term "digital identity" has been replaced by "digital ID" in government and industry publications and press releases. Steve and George unravel this deliberate linguistic shift from the amorphous 'digital identity' to the more con...

Data provides the basis for how we make decisions. An enemy of security these days, from our point of view, is plain text. We need better than that. We need device-assisted support for proving where data comes from and how it's been handled. We need systems that keep data (and code) from being altered without cause, that give us the ability to trace the change history of data.  Confidential c...

Credential sharing is complex and exciting. Take a listen to our guest, Dan Stemp from JNCTN, in this installment of Making Data Better. We discuss JNCTN's credential sharing platform and its major use cases.  Discover how managing digital identities supports the work of critical industries, from power generation to healthcare. We unpack the intricate relationships between those who rely on c...

Ever wondered about government's role in online identification and how it could expand to help our digital economy function better and safer? Or how government data quality directly impacts risk assessment? In this episode of Making Data Better , we tackle where US and Australian governments stand on protecting our digital IDs and personal credentials. Join us as Jeremy Grant , Managing Direc...

In October 2008 Heartland Payment Systems discovered it had been breached. Albert Gonzalez and several other individuals hacked their way through an external company website using SQL injection — an attack that too often still works — to the core of Heartland’s systems. They were able to copy credit and debit card numbers and other data used in payment authorization. At the time, that data enabled...

Self-sovereign identity, digital wallets, risk management, federated identity, and a recap of the Identiverse 2023 conference are among the topics discussed in this episode of Making Data Better. George and Steve complete their landscape view of data quality and security. Identiverse 2023 reflected those topics, indicating a shift toward digital wallets, passkeys, and verifiable credentials as ess...

Online trust? Digital identification? Wallets? Privacy? Data quality? If these topics resonate, join Lockstep's George Peabody and Steve Wilson in this, the first episode of Making Data Better , a podcast about data quality and the impact it has on how we protect, manage, and use the digital data critical to our lives. We focus on making data better because data quality has everything to do w...

Making Data Better is a podcast about data quality and the impact it has on how we protect, manage and use the digital data critical to our lives. Take a listen to this intro. We're launching the first episodes in June 2023.