The Case for a Decentralized Digital Identity
What does Identity mean to you?
Hint: It depends on the context you are looking at the identity under.
Different people have different meanings and associations with identity.
For a Bank, your identity might be your Account Number and/or your Social Security Number.
For the SEC, it might be anything that validates KYC.
For Hospitals, it is your Healthcare record.
For you favorite bar next door, it is your Driver’s License (or anything that establishes your age over 21.)
THE TRUTH IS, EVERYONE HAS A DIFFERENT MEANING FOR YOUR IDENTITY.
With so many interpretations, how can you effectively represent your identity? In the digital world, this problem gets even worse.
Here’s the truth:
The REAL IDENTITY IS YOU.
Institutions around you simply codify those attestations about you.
For e.g. it is the Government that attests the fact that you were born in a given country by providing you with a birth certificate or a passport.
With the advent of the Internet, we needed new ways of representing our Identities.
With the explosion of Social media, we made the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook the custodians of our Identity.
For them, your Identity is your Social Network.
While it was all innocuous and convenient at the beginning, the consequences of handing over some of our most private information are dire, and are just coming to light now.
It is time to rethink who’s in charge of this information.
So who’s in charge of your Identity?
The correct answer always is: YOU.
YOU and ONLY YOU should be in charge of your identity.
The World is slowly waking up to this reality and are relying on us to come up with a solution. No longer can we rest knowing that some other party controls access to our identity without our permission.
The article is a repost from the original Blog entry: https://www.hypertrends.com/2018/05/decentralized-blockchain-identity/
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