Rethinking Digital Identity The Rise of Role-Based Agency Part 1

Aug 5

In today's digital world, identity verification is often synonymous with revealing personal information. This traditional approach, while effective, comes with significant risks such as privacy loss, data breaches, and misuse of personal information. Secours is pioneering a transformative shift in this paradigm with its Role-Based Agency (RBA) protocol, which promises to revolutionize how digital identity and agency are managed.

What is Role-Based Agency?

Role-Based Agency (RBA) is a groundbreaking protocol that redefines digital interactions by focusing on roles rather than static identities. Instead of verifying who someone is, RBA verifies what they are authorized to do. This shift from identity-centric to role-centric authorization minimizes unnecessary data disclosure and enhances privacy.

How Does RBA Work?

RBA operates on the principle of contextual authorization. Roles, not identities, serve as the basis for access and authorization. Through cryptographically verifiable credentials and context-specific personas, individuals can assert their rights, permissions, or obligations necessary to participate in a digital transaction. This ensures that actions are permitted based on roles that have been lawfully issued, delegated, or revoked, and are always bound to explicit consent, purpose, and time constraints.

The Benefits of RBA

By separating the actor from the role, RBA eliminates the need for centralized identifiers and ensures that participation in digital ecosystems can be selective, lawful, ephemeral, and controlled by the user. This approach not only enhances privacy but also aligns with international privacy laws such as GDPR and emerging standards for decentralized identity.

Paul Knowles, Secours.ai Chief Product Officer, emphasizes, "RBA is not just a technological advancement; it's a fundamental shift in how we think about digital identity and agency. It empowers individuals by giving them control over their digital interactions while ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards."

Stay tuned for Part 2 - Transforming Digital Interactions with Secours.ai Role-Based Agency

Paul Knowles

Paul Knowles, the inventor and leading figure behind Decentralised Semantics, is a pioneer in semantic data infrastructure and trusted data exchange. As Co-founder and Chief Data Officer of Secours.ai, Paul is helping build the foundational data infrastructure for the AI-driven future — enabling responsible artificial general intelligence (AGI) through ethically grounded, consent-based, and interoperable systems.

He is the inventor of the Overlays Capture Architecture (OCA) — a breakthrough public utility framework for data harmonization and semantic interoperability across distributed ecosystems. OCA enables structural, definitional, and contextual alignment of data, ensuring deterministic integrity, provenance, and meaningful interoperability at scale.

Paul brings over 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical biometrics, having led or contributed to major data initiatives at companies including Roche, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Amgen, and Pfizer. His unique blend of scientific depth and systems-thinking equips him to align complex data pipelines with next-generation AI and data governance architectures.

In addition to his leadership at Secours.ai, Paul continues to serve as an official editor and steward of the OCA Technical Specification. He is also active in broader digital trust ecosystems, including his work with 0PN, where he contributes to the development of next-generation transparency and security applications aligned with international privacy standards and adequacy frameworks.

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