Identity Management in the Age of Insecurity

ALL STORIES BLOCKCHAIN STORYTELLING

Over the past few years, the problem of identity theft and hacks of personal data has made regular headlines. Entire websites are dedicated to describing and documenting their growing frequency. Search engines, social media, public email platforms, credit card and mobile service providers, hackers, politicians, and radical political groups have all aggressively manipulated and abused our personal online data to politically sway, sell to, impersonate or outright steal digital assets or manipulate the behavior of large demographic swaths of the population.

The result: outcomes of presidential elections have been altered, vast amounts of digital money stolen, personal health and credit card records leaked, and reputations tarnished.

We are living in a time of identity warfare, and the massive computer and internet-based machinery that we have created to store and protect our personal data have been turned against us by unscrupulous online actors.

We are in a new era of cybersecurity

It has been a very brief period in human history since we’ve developed such an overwhelming dependence on data and it’s secure storage and retrieval. With the transformation of money from notes and coins to online currencies (today only 8% of the world’s equivalent of $96 trillion in fiat currency exists as physical cash), we have trusted our life savings to digital platforms that are under continuous attack by increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals.

And it’s not just money. Think of all the sensitive data that is sitting on vulnerable, centralised online servers and the consequences if that data were maliciously stolen, erased or altered:

Federal intelligence data

Surveillance data about criminal and terrorist networks

Personal health records

Criminal records

Political affiliation data

Online dating profiles

Educational records

Credit card account data

Employment records

You can easily imagine the adverse results if any of this data were compromised, changed, deleted, encrypted for ransomware or publically revealed: terrorist attacks couldn’t be thwarted, illicit drug shipments undetected, insurance policies denied, employment lost, confidential health problems divulged, jobs lost, families destroyed etc. The fact is that our personal and professional lives are completely dependent on data that is by no means 100% secure.