Earlier drafts of the Contact Initiative proposed a single, centrally issued national identifier — a ten-digit number assigned at enrollment and later released back into a national pool for reassignment. Technical and legal review flagged two serious risks: a reassigned identifier can carry forward old associations, and a single national identity store is one high-value breach target for an entire population’s personal data at once.
Version 5 replaces that design with a federated, four-layer model that delivers the same fast lookup and clear tiering — without either risk.
The Four Layers
- Identity anchor — a locally issued, opaque identifier for each person, controlled by the state or district (K–12) or institution/federation (higher ed). Never reused — retired and archived instead.
- Federation / attestation layer — short-lived, cryptographically signed claims (“this anchor currently maps to an enrolled student”) held by the national registry. No bulk personal data.
- Alias layer — the human-facing address people actually use day to day, freely rotatable without touching the anchor beneath it.
- Relationship / authorization layer — a mutable table of who currently holds guardianship or delegated authorization for a given anchor.
This separation is what lets the system handle situations the old single-number model couldn’t: a custody change becomes an update to the relationship layer, not a reissued child identity; a name change updates the alias without disturbing the anchor; and one person — say, a parent who is also a graduate instructor — can hold multiple independently scoped attestations under a single anchor.