New for 2019: An Internet that Logs Into You
At the dawn of the internet, we needed to work out who was who and enable access and permissions. So some bright spark invented logins and passwords. I still remember the login page for my Yahoo! Account back in 1998. I think it was the first time I ever created a username and password. It hasn’t changed much since then.

These days I use a password manager that generates a unique password for every site I use. I just checked, and I have 460 unique accounts each with a unique password. Ok, I’m an outlier, but the average business user has 191 passwords, according to password manager LastPass. (If you reuse any of your passwords — and most people do — you need to stop.)
Today, we log in to everything. Remember the phrase “there’s an app for that”? Well, there’s also likely a password for that too.
We are fragmented. You log into the internet in dozens of different places every day. In each one you leave different fragments of your identity. Many overlap. Some are unique.
But imagine a different way. Imagine a world where the internet logged into you instead. Where any service you went to would ask to connect to you. What would that mean?
The way we gained access to things would change. Instead of you filling out password forms to connect, the service would connect to you and check itself. Like a push notification: is it ok if I check your identity and log you in? If you accept — perhaps by allowing an iris scan or just saying yes on a second authentication factor, you are just in. There is no password to remember.
It would would mean the API-ification of the internet would continue to increase, but with you at the center. Everything would connect through you. As sites accessed your data and wrote data and looked to share it with each other, they could connect back through the central hub — you.
As this increased, you would regain much more control over your digital identity, because much of the information would start to aggregate in one place. Every site would read your information, instead of just having it. So you would be much safer against attack. (Think about securing it once, properly, rather than 460 times individually, some of which get hacked.)
Take this a step further. If properly incentivized, sites and apps would write information back to your core ID, in exchange to monetize it and run better services.
That information would then be much richer and deeper than ever. Imagine a single place where you would keep all your balances, friends, location data, medical history, DNA, purchase history, what you read, what you say, your heart rate and other bio markers, etc. It would all be updating in real time. Suddenly you have more information at your fingertips than any company now has. And you would have power to do things with it.
Perhaps you may think this is less secure, but all of this information is already available — you just store each thing in a dozen places. It’s the illusion of safety. Dozens of pieces of information stored in hundreds of places. This fragmentation is a massive threat more than a benefit. Much safer to do it once, very securely, and watch that one place — you wouldn’t store identical copies of your money in 10 different locations (mostly because it’s not possible). You store it in one vault with a ton of security.

If all this information was in one place, it would also open up new ways to monetize it. For once, perhaps you could participate in the release of your own data — because you would have richer, deeper, more current information about yourself than anyone else could ever have.
Flipping this paradigm — from you logging into the internet, to it accessing you — could be one of the most fundamental advances in technology of this decade. It would affect every person on the planet and every company.
In return, the companies that serve you would have to fight for your attention based on their ability to provide great service, not the depth of their data on you. It would go a long way to leveling the playing field and allowing new entrants the same power as the big boys.
Over time, this identity can become your own AI. Why talk to Siri or Cortana when you can talk to yourself — or the digital version of you. You create your own AI that knows what you know (and knows what things you don’t know), that understands how you like to communicate, what you need, and would make the same decisions you would make.
At Glyph we call this central identity a single self identity — because for the first time you would no longer be fragmented. You would be whole again. That brings with it a host of practical, emotional, and economic benefits.
I’d argue it’s the biggest thing coming your way before the end of the decade.
