The Right to Digital Identity: a Legal-Technological Framework for the Metaverse

In an increasingly digitalised world, where the offline and online dimensions converge to the point of becoming indistinguishable, digital identity occupies a role that is ever more central and, for too long, has been underestimated. In contemporary legal orders, the protection of identity rests upon a mosaic. Sectoral instruments protect individual attributes, such as the name, the image, personal data, freedom of expression and identification, each in isolation. None of them grasps identity as a unitary legal interest. This fragmentation, already problematic in the offline dimension, becomes structurally untenable in the digital environment and reaches its breaking point in immersive contexts such as the Metaverse, where the boundary between online and offline erodes and identity is continuously generated, expressed and tracked through embodied interaction. The present thesis, written from a de iure condendo perspective, articulates a unitary response to this diagnosis. The research question may be formulated as follows: in what manner, and through which legal and technological instruments, can digital identity be effectively protected as a unitary legal interest, given that existing legal orders offer only fragmentary and, ultimately, inadequate forms of protection? The hypothesis advanced in response is that effective protection requires two interdependent layers: a legal layer, grounded in the recognition of digital identity as a fundamental right derived from personal identity, and a technological layer, grounded in blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). The two dimensions are not merely complementary. They are mutually constitutive. The argument unfolds across three chapters. The first chapter reconstructs the philosophical and legal evolution of the right to personal identity, from the Italian case law of the 1970s to the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, by way of the express constitutional recognition found in certain legal orders. From this comparative panorama emerges the structural critique of the mosaic model and the need for a paradigm shift. The second chapter extends the analysis to the digital dimension, demonstrating that the fragmentation of the mosaic does not merely replicate itself online, but is amplified. The distinction between identification and identity is reaffirmed as foundational: regulating the verification of identity claims is not equivalent to protecting the legal interest of the person in their own digital self-representation. The chapter further examines, through a comparative analysis, the various legal instruments, mostly of soft law nature, together with the definitions offered to date, highlighting the inconsistencies and weaknesses of so heterogeneous and confused a landscape. 4 The third chapter articulates the proposal. The metaverse serves as the privileged testing environment, since it radicalises every limit of the existing model: the uncertain legal nature of avatars, the inadequacy of current regulation in the face of immersive environments, the unprecedented sensitivity of the biometric and kinematic data generated by embodied interaction, and the new threats that generative artificial intelligence introduces to identity integrity. Against this background, the thesis proposes a unitary right to digital identity as a fundamental right endowed with erga omnes efficacy, capable of operating beyond the territorial reach of any single jurisdiction and of imposing non-derogable limits on the contractual autonomy of platforms. The technological layer is then examined through the SSI paradigm, whose properties of decentralisation, selective disclosure and non-falsifiability align, by design, with the normative requirements of the proposed right. A use case in Decentraland provides a concrete demonstration of the viability of this integrated approach. The thesis identifies five essential components of the proposed right: identity self-determination, accurate representation, selective disclosure, identity continuity and protection from algorithmic manipulation. The Author acknowledges, with intellectual honesty, its limits as well. The proposal does not resolve the definitional uncertainty that surrounds digital identity, does not dissolve the divergences between legal traditions, and does not anticipate the technological maturity that its effective implementation would require. Its scope is more modest and, at the same time, more deliberate: to indicate a direction, rather than to mark a point of arrival. If the right to have rights, in the digital world, passes through the right to have an identity, the present work simply seeks to render the distance between the current state of the art and that horizon a little shorter, and the direction of travel a little clearer.