DataBench, First Person team up on privacy-first IDs

DataBench has agreed to collaborate with the First Person Cooperative on digital identity technology focused on proof of personhood and privacy-preserving trust online.

The work will centre on digital credentials designed to distinguish real people from AI agents and other automated accounts. The partners framed this as a growing challenge as AI-generated content and automated interactions become more common across consumer and business services.

First Person Cooperative, based in San Francisco, is behind the First Person Initiative, which it describes as an international, multi-stakeholder collaboration. DataBench is an Australian company led by founder and chief executive David Christmas.

Proof of personhood

The collaboration will explore ways to verify that a user is a unique person online while maintaining privacy. The approach avoids building a global biometric database and steers clear of technologies the partners describe as privacy-invasive.

The architecture uses open standards for verifiable digital credentials. Verifiable credentials are cryptographically secured digital records that can be presented to confirm specific claims. They can also support selective disclosure, allowing someone to prove a fact without revealing all underlying information.

Drummond Reed, director of the First Person Cooperative, described proof of personhood as a key issue as AI systems spread into everyday online activity.

"With the rapidly advancing adoption of AI, proof of personhood has become one of the most important problems facing the entire Internet," Reed said. "We welcome a collaboration with DataBench to bring First Person credentials to every online trust community that needs them, starting with families."

MAX environment

DataBench plans to connect the work to its product MAX, which it describes as a private internet environment. It said the collaboration aligns with its broader view of personal ownership and control over digital activity.

"The DataBench mission is to return control of customers' digital lives, and thereby redefine what it means to go online," Christmas said. "MAX is our private internet environment, and at its core, it is about bringing dignity and personal ownership back into everyday lives. We share this purpose with the First Person Initiative, underscoring the vital role humans must play in asserting their digital agency."

The collaboration follows a series of meetings at the Summit on Human Agency in Napa Valley, California. The next phase includes an experimental product concept that uses existing real-world trust relationships as the basis for online interactions.

Affinidi role

Affinidi will lead the next stage of development. The company provides infrastructure used by the First Person Initiative.

Glenn Gore, chief executive of Affinidi, said the collaboration would bring trust infrastructure into a privacy-focused browsing experience. He pointed to decentralised trust graphs, which represent relationships and attestations between entities without relying on a central authority.

Gore said, "There are rare moments when pioneering technology and genuine human need arrive at exactly the same time. This collaboration is one of them. What DataBench and the First Person Initiative are building brings verifiable trust infrastructure, such as Decentralized Trust Graphs (DTG's), directly into the privacy browser. Meaning that for the first time, people can prove who they are online without surrendering who they are. We're starting with the most personal of all communities: family. Whether that's a single person or many generations. There is no more powerful, or more honest, place to begin."

Family testing

The initial focus is the family unit and other small-community environments. The partners described these as settings where a small group can establish and operate online with privacy and without external surveillance or monitoring.

The emphasis reflects a wider debate in the digital identity sector. Large-scale identity systems can raise concerns about centralised data collection and misuse. Smaller deployments can provide a controlled setting for technical testing and user experience design, and help assess how offline trust relationships translate into online credentials and interactions.

The current work is a proof of concept that could later be applied in broader contexts where businesses and online communities need stronger verification of real users and better privacy controls.

DataBench and the First Person Cooperative said the project could reduce reliance on centralised platforms by promoting decentralised identity and community-led systems. They said they expect to provide regular updates in the coming months.