Identity in the Digital Age: An Endangered Species?
Your identity data is a white-hot commodity. According to Experian, the value of personal credentials breaks down as follows: Social Security numbers fetch about a dollar, a driver’s license is worth $20, credit card data sells for about $20 and online payment logins can go for as much as $200.
These prices explain why nearly 10 billion identities have been stolen since 2013. Security provider Gemalto estimates more than 5 million identities around the world are compromised each day, meaning there are 59 identity thefts every second.
The majority of identity thefts can be traced back to massive, headline-grabbing data breaches that have razed the databases of leading companies such as Target, Home Depot, eBay, and Anthem Blue Cross in recent years.
Government agencies are just as vulnerable. In the last decade, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs was hacked, affecting more than 25 million veterans, as was the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which resulted in the identities of nearly 22 million citizens being stolen.
Centralized identity data makes identity theft easier
When high-profile corporations and agencies are attacked, it drives home a painful conclusion: Our current identity security standards and protocols are badly broken.
You don’t even need to look back very far for evidence. In 2017 alone, nearly 17 million U.S. consumers were victimized by ID thieves, according to Javelin Strategy & Research. But this finding reflects only part of the story. As more details emerge surrounding last year’s massive Equifax breach, we now know hackers captured more than 147 million identities in that one breach alone. These stolen credentials will fuel a variety of crimes for many years to come.
Yet, despite these alarming numbers, incidents of identity barely register as major “news events.” Epic data breaches are announced, authorities quickly work to triage the situation; vendors are alerted and consumers warned. But the cost of these crimes is too steep to ignore: ID theft costs consumers nearly $17 billion last year alone.
We can no longer afford to wait for security companies and law enforcement to catch up with cybercriminals and come to the rescue. It’s time to completely overhaul how we manage our identities.
How Blockchain Identity Management Can Help
The current identity methodology — both online and in the real world — requires people to create, store, and maintain an average of 130+ passwords. This juggling act helps explain why identities are so vulnerable.
The lifeID Foundation is proposing a more effective approach: It is building an open, permissionless — and highly-secure — blockchain-based identity service called the lifeID Platform. This platform will be deployed and managed by the self-sustaining, self-funding lifeID Foundation, an identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) layer for the blockchain ecosystem that supports a wide variety of identity-specific transactions.
Included in the platform will be a more simple, secure and straightforward solution to our international “identity crisis” — a life-long, self-sovereign digital identity called “lifeID™”.
lifeID will provide users with the same single sign-on (SSO) convenience that a Facebook or Google logins offer, but free of the many risks and potential privacy violations we have come to associate with social media corporations.
Armed with a self-sovereign digital identity, each user will be empowered to securely and easily manage his or her online and real-world transactions whenever authenticating identification is a requirement. Best of all, users will be empowered to transact free of the third-party oversight and intrusion social media companies, financial institutions, corporations and government agencies inject in the current structure.
Intrigued? Want to know more.
lifeID has created a whitepaper explaining how this self-sovereign solution will forever change the concept of identity and how we use it.
The whitepaper, Welcome to lifeID, shows how:
- Blockchain technology makes an open, permissionless and highly-secure, identity platform a reality
- This cutting-edge identity platform enables consumers to fully own, protect and manage their identities
- One single, lifelong identity can be adapted to both the demands of the digital- and real-world
