Who are we on the Internet? Differences between digital identity, identification and ID

Andrea Catán
tracción.digital
Published in
4 min readMay 25, 2020

What we show on our social networks, the web pages that we regularly visit and even what we search for, define who we are on the Internet. This is valuable information both in the digital world and in the physical world; therefore, it is necessary to know the differences between digital identity, identification and ID in order to make conscious use of our data on the network.

Digital identity: how others see us

Digital identity is a rather broad concept, which refers to a set of information on the internet that is relative to the image that others have of us. It contains not only our personal data, it also includes the images that we share on our social networks or in which we appear, the news that is related to us, our musical tastes, sports, movies, etc.

Similarly, the digital identity contains who our loved ones are, to which social circle we belong, our trade or profession, what we study or what we dedicate our free time to, what are our philosophical, religious or political affinities and more. All this information is used to establish a reputation against others on the Internet.

Now, it is possible to have more than one digital identity that differs little or a lot from who we are or what we do in the physical or professional world, but, in any case, our digital identities are always influenced by what we do.

Digital identity is so important today that those people whose digital divide prevents them from participating in Internet activities suffer from social exclusion.

Identification: Who are we?

Identification, known in English as PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is all that information that can be used to identify us, contact us or even know our exact location in the world.

In this category enter our full name, age and date of birth, address, personal identification (ID, DNI, driver’s license, social security, among others), cell phone number, the name of our parents, IP address and the numbers of our cards and bank accounts.

In addition, it includes marital status, nationality and gender, the registration number of our vehicle, what distinctive physical marks we have, our medical, educational, political, sexual and labor history, as well as judicial, sports and military.

But the identification category also includes information that only new technologies can process, such as facial scans, voice scans, our DNA sequence and fingerprints.

PII is a concept that is used in information security and is older than the Internet, but the use of technology has made it very relevant today. The reason is that the management and use of this information is valuable, not only for us or the companies we trust to deliver it, but also for hackers who want to take advantage of it.

Identification talks about who we are in the physical world and how this translates to the digital world.

The ID: what identifies us as users

An ID, for its part, is a more specific concept. It comes from the English User Identification and is also known as username, nickname or user account. It is used to identify people who use a specific software, computer system or web page.

The ID is created when we register in any technological environment and serves to differentiate ourselves from other users. For this reason, the ID is unique and non-transferable. It is usually associated with a password and we can have several on the network, as each application requests it.

Although we can use the same ID in multiple applications, it will always be unique to that software, unless the applications share data with each other.

In turn, an ID can be used to create and validate other IDs. For example, to validate our registration in most of the sites we will have to log in with our email. Also, the social network Facebook allows us to register in new applications or websites just by authorizing the linking of the accounts.

The differences between digital identity, identification and ID are clear. Digital identity belongs to the network, but can interact with the physical world. Identification, for its part, refers to elements of the physical world transferred to the digital world. And the ID is limited to our identification in a specific digital environment.

The combination of the information contained in these three categories defines who we are on the Internet. It is vitally important to protect this data and not share it with anyone, to avoid theft, scam or identity theft.

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