We operate in a highly-digitized world where healthcare providers, financial institutions, schools, merchants, employers, streaming services, social media companies and government institutions all expect us to create — and manage — a portfolio of unique logins.
According to Dashline, the average email address is now connected to 130 different accounts and juggling these multiple identities is beginning to take its toll.
Consider these recent findings from Janrain:
- Complex passwords requirements discourage 58 percent of users from opening new accounts
- 75 percent of respondents report they suffer from “password fatigue”
- 37 percent forget their password on a weekly basis
In other words, the very security measures that were introduced to help protect our information have become barriers in our digital lives.
Single Sign-On Solutions Won’t Solve the Problem
The tech industry responded to password fatigue by introducing an array of single-sign-on/password management software providers. By unifying all our passwords under one login, providers such as LastPass, Keeper, Dashlane, 1Password and OneLogin would make our lives easier; however, each of these companies have been hacked in recent years.
“Password pain” has also led many social media users to leverage their Facebook and Google credentials as semi-universal logins. However, as we’ve been recently reminded yet again, these tech kingpins do lousy jobs protecting our identity data.
The Facebook/Cambridge Analytical data harvesting debacle is only the latest example, but it was not really surprising news. It was just the most recent example of Facebook monetizing identity data. In 2014, Gigya found about 80 percent of consumers were wary about sharing social media data.
What they knew in 2014 is now painfully obvious: once you hand over your identity data to centralized tech giants like Facebook, Google, YouTube and others, they are in control of your data. They can deny users access at any time, for any reason and they are not required to provide an explanation or offer recourse. When a user is locked out of an account, their digital identity is locked away as well.
Reclaim Your Identity
Take back your identity — for good.
The lifeID Foundation is creating a solution that allows you to do just that: the lifeID Platform, an open, permissionless — and highly-secure — blockchain-based identity service.
It will provide users the convenience that a Facebook or Google login offers, but without the risks or compromises. It offers a more simple, secure and straightforward method to manage your identity.
Want to know more? lifeID lays it all out in a newly-created, in-depth whitepaper, Welcome to lifeID. The whitepaper makes an airtight case documenting that centralized data storage is a broken approach while introducing a new solution works that will transform the way we manage identity.
