Personhood Credentials: Human-Centered Design Recommendation Balancing Security, Usability, and Trust

TL;DR

This paper explores user perceptions of personhood credentials (PHCs), analyzing preferences and design considerations to balance security, usability, and trust in digital identity verification.

Contribution

It provides the first user-centered analysis of PHCs, offering concrete design recommendations based on interviews and competitive analysis.

Findings

Users prefer trusted issuers like governments.

Biometric and physical ID data influence onboarding preferences.

Designs like periodic verification and supervised issuance are recommended.

Abstract

Building on related concepts, like, decentralized identifiers (DIDs), proof of personhood, anonymous credentials, personhood credentials (PHCs) emerged as an alternative approach, enabling individuals to verify to digital service providers that they are a person without disclosing additional information. However, new technologies might introduce some friction due to users misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. Despite their growing importance, limited research has been done on users perceptions and preferences regarding PHCs. To address this gap, we conducted competitive analysis, and semi-structured online user interviews with 23 participants from US and EU to provide concrete design recommendations for PHCs that incorporate user needs, adoption rules, and preferences. Our study -- (a)surfaces how people reason about unknown privacy and security guarantees of PHCs compared to current verification methods -- (b) presents the impact of several factors on how people would like to onboard and manage PHCs, including, trusted issuers (e.g. gov), ground truth data to issue PHC (e.g biometrics, physical id), and issuance system (e.g. centralized vs decentralized). In a think-aloud conceptual design session, participants recommended -- conceptualized design, such as periodic biometrics verification, time-bound credentials, visually interactive human-check, and supervision of government for issuance system. We propose actionable designs reflecting users preferences.