identity management

Today’s Cumbersome Process for Obtaining a New Passport

Today’s cumbersome process required to obtain a new passport serves as proof that the identity management system is corrupted. Businesses, governments, and non-governmental groups have pledged to combine identities in order to give people complete control over who has access to their personal information and to reduce theft and fraud. Digital signatures are dispersed among the numerous activities that people engage in. These services use it mostly for their own development, though. Thus, blockchain holds up hope for improving things. Digitization, the process of converting analog data to digital data, has caused information to be dispersed among several parties, giving each one of them their own pieces of an individual’s identity.

The Risks and Benefits of Digital Identity

The digital sense has it that people do not own themselves, but third parties do. The information on oneself that they provide can be breached or readily bought or sold without their knowledge making it risky in that their profiles get easily manipulated. Alternatively, it is expedient in that you get efficiently targeted recommendations unknowingly people work for Facebook and Amazon as the product and not the customers, and they get compensated with efficiency and no payment for giving up their data.

The Complete Model of Digital Self

A complete model of one’s digital self-resembles a web with connections called subwebs, these subwebs then come together to make the more extensive network that makes one’s digital identity.

Repossessing Ownership of Your Digital Identity

Steps to repossessing ownership of your digital identity include; set up control of the nodes so you can revoke or grant permission for access and combine all the nodes into one place, so your digital profile is contained and no longer broken. Putting our identity on blockchain would give us more supremacy over this information and enable us to offer just the least set of details a given party requires to identify us, (Miller).

The Need for Self-Sovereign Identity

The question of concern, is there need to sacrifice convenience over supremacy? There is a need for self-sovereign identity (Wire). People should exercise complete power over their digital selves and be the ones to allow for third party access to their profiles, only the customer owns the customer data. The Equifax suffering a massive data breach expresses why sovereignty is significant in a set up where we are pushed to give in our credit details to a third party so they can use or lose the data in a manner that dramatically uncovers us (Skinner).

The Promises of Blockchain Technology

People have come up with numerous solutions however none offers full protection except for the Blockchain technology, which 2017 was crowned the panacea of the year with most of its promises awaiting testing. An ideal situation is exhibited by; the owner exercising full control over their identity access points thus no authority by third parties, practicing zero-knowledge proofs and sticking to specific records in that your identity details are one consolidated truth, and in the end, you own the virtual you (Milanovic).

Works Cited

Milanovic, Nick,“ The next revolution will be reclaiming your digital identity,” https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/17/the-next-revolution-will-be-reclaiming-your-digital-identity/. Oct.1, 2017

Miller, Ron. ”The promise of managing identity on the blockchain,” https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/the-promise-of-managing-identity-on-the-blockchain/. Web. Oct.1, 2017.

Skinner, Chris. “The digital transformation journey,” 2017, https://thefinanser.com/2017/09/digital-transformation-journey.html/, Web. Oct.1, 2017.

Wire, Willis. “Identity theft is on the rise. Are you protected?” 2014. https://blog.willis.com/2014/08/identity-theft-is-on-the-rise-are-you-protected/ Web. Oct.1, 2017.