Why Digital Identities Are Key in the Digital Age
Amazon has announced it will be using a technology that reads palms, which can be tied to your Amazon account so you can literally pay with a palm scan at over 500 Whole Foods stores. While it is an interesting idea, though not a new one, what remains to be seen is public adoption. These systems are called biometrics, but they may only be a stop-gap option on the road to a digital identity.
Much of our social and commercial transactions today happen through digital systems. The majority of money today is just databases that talk to other databases. We pay with watches and phones. Social currency is through social media. This digital layer is pervasive even in developing nations.
As the internet evolved, the ideology was that it would be free, accessible to everyone and open. That it would be the greatest way to connect humanity. Indeed it has been. And will continue to be.
Some today bemoan that it has become over commercialised, run and ruled by Tech Giants, no longer free. I’d argue it’s still very much the new frontier and a Wild West. Keep in mind that the internet (I include the world wide web in this) is made up of a multitude of networks.
Yes, some networks are tightly controlled, locked down and run by large technology companies. For the most part, this is actually good. Such systems tend to be safer psychologically and in terms of fraud.
There are still many open, wild spaces on the internet, with little regulations and oversight. These are often referred to collectively as the Dark Web. It is often portrayed as the place where all the nasty stuff happens. Yes, there’s nasty stuff there, there’s also nasty stuff on the regular internet or Light Web if we must.
Good and bad stuff happen on both for a reason. Human behaviour.
We often think of the digital world, the internet or cyberspace, as an “other” place. That it is somehow separate from our real-world lives and the experiences we have in the physical world are different. In some ways they are. But when it comes to the behaviours, traditions and patterns of thinking, story telling, the internet is the mirror of our inner selves.
And we’ve done a rather messy job of both understanding that and applying our cultural methods of dealing with this type of thinking. Cultural systems we would be very quick to apply in the physical world.
Much of the reason we behave differently online is what we’ve known for a long time; the ability to hide our true identities. To step outside the social norms that provide boundaries for how we behave towards each other in the real world. Studies have shown this. Inherently, we know this. It is culture at work.
Yes, there are those that behave badly in the real world. Always have been and always will be, for a variety of reasons.
Social media platforms have struggled to deal with this issue for many years in a number of ways. So have media companies. With some media outlets simply turning off commenting. No solution has fully worked. Not even Artificial Intelligence, which Facebook tried, solved for toxicity and misinformation.
Tech companies approach has been solving for problems, rather than critical thinking and believing technology alone can solve these problems. Obviously, it can’t.
Yet for some reason, we remain hesitant to apply the rules of sociocultural systems we use in the real world to the digital world. Key among these is the signals and behaviours we use to prove who we are, not just for citizen purposes but for social purposes.
Over thousands of years we have evolved different methods of establishing trust and identity between humans. We smile to show friendliness or agreement. We shake hands as part of building trust. Put a hand on a shoulder. Wink. Hold our hands up with open palms to show we carry no weapons. Some cultures bow to show respect and trust.
Digital identity, or what some are calling sovereign identity systems as an idea have been around for sometime. But citizens fear them as a dystopian nightmare descending like a dark beast over us, while others look at these systems purely from a financial perspective. These approaches have proven ineffective.
Digital identities could in fact, give us greater freedoms, improve the toxicity of the internet, significantly reduce fraud and cyberbullying and help us evolve new sociocultural norms and behaviours for a future that will be increasingly interconnected.
Perhaps the biggest myth or misconception around digital identity systems with the general public is that they must be controlled by the government. That the government therefore knows everything we do in the digital world. This is not the case at all.
There is a government connection. But it doesn’t go beyond a simple digital handshake just an acknowledgement that yes, this person is in fact a real human and we know this. Governments around the world already know who we are, to varying degrees. It’s why we have drivers licenses, passports.
Try traveling to another country without a passport. When you use that passport the only thing the other country knows is that you’re known in your home country as a citizen of that country. Ideally that your rights will be respected in the country you’re visiting as long as you respect their laws. Unless of course, you’re traveling to a place like North Korea. But that system of identity verification is acknowledged and understood.
Digital identities work in a similar way. Some tech giants, like Apple, already have a form of digital identity such as your AppleID, which is extending over ever more applications and services. In a way, we have already abrogated digital identity to a corporation. This should be of far more concern than a system that protects privacy and rights at fundamental level through the Rule of Law.
What is needed, even though it may sound somewhat dystopian is a digital identity system that is viable around the world. The UN is proposing this. The Linux Foundation and others have been developing solutions. Some using blockchain, others using different technology approaches.
The passport is a good representation that such a global system can be effective, be implemented and work. It is already a global identity system and increasingly has digital elements to it, though it is inherently paper based. It does not have to be. Of course, some countries don’t accept other countries passports for political reasons, but the system itself is a global standard.
A digital identity may be the best technological solution we have right now to deal with cybercrime, cyberbullying and other issues. No, it won’t solve for everything. It is not a silver bullet. It is part of a suite of tools and frameworks. The internet is still a wild and wooly place. But it is time that we start to apply some of the norms, behaviours and rules we set up in real life to the digital world. They’ve become far too intertwined not to.
