Social Recovery

Introduction to Social Recovery

Social recovery is a process where you can recover your BrightID with consent from close connections you trust and rely upon.

Why is it important?

• To regain your BrightID if:

  • You lose your mobile phone. It got broken, lost, or someone stole it.

  • The app accidentally becomes corrupted and unusable, or unintentionally gets uninstalled.

• To migrate your BrightID to a new phone even if it is functioning perfectly in your old one.

• Last but not least, to have strong and stable connections that higher level verification protocols like Aura(under construction) can have something to work with in determining whether it can reflect and have you receive the higher level verification of uniqueness.

Who should be your recovery connections?

• The connections must consent to being your recovery connection and mark you as "already known." They must also really know you just as well as you know them. These are people you will never forget, nor they forget you. See also "Making Connections" section. A public and well-known person like the connection party host, or a celebrity, is only suitable to be your recovery connection if you really know each other personally. If they do not already know you, which is likely the case for most of us, you will definitely not have their consent to be your recovery connection.

• They must be someone you trust not to steal your BrightID. So choose family, friends, colleagues, or kinships you develop in a community(IRL or Virtual) that care about and respect you just as well as you care about and respect them.

• They must be reliable to be there for you, as you will need to be able to reach out and contact them every time you need to recover your BrightID.

NOTE:

• If your recovery connections do not want to bother with receiving verifications, your recovery connections do not have to have a BrightID verification like the "Meets"; Only installing the app and keeping it updated is sufficient and necessary. Close family and friends usually care enough and respect you to not mind the responsibility, and they are indeed a popular choice among BrightID holders to rely on them for recovery.

• You must select at least three recovery connections to pass setup. Ideally, around seven recovery connections can make it really secure. Greater the number of stable recovery level connections, the better.

• As you will see in the setup process next, only two recovery connections are actually needed to be present for the actual recovery process at the time when you need to recover.

Next section details social recovery setup