Find out more about online identity

Identity is a confusing issue. There is much debate and many intelligent people are putting a lot of thought into it - and it is also generating a lot of arguments. People want to keep their private life private, but still want to prove who they are to strangers.

To prove who we are we have credit cards, driving licenses, passports, birth certificates, utility bills (as proof of address), email addresses, usernames and passwords, PIN numbers, first names, last names, dates of birth, mother's maiden names etc... the list goes on. This diversity makes it easy for someone to gather together enough parts of your identity to steal it.

What can we do to secure our identity once it is stolen? How can we reclaim the things from the list above? We can easily change passwords and PIN numbers if we know which ones have been stolen. Surely the answer is to centralise on one piece of identification. Well - if you are a government forcing it on your citizens then you better get ready for a fight. People are who they are and don't need their government to tell them.

What is missing is choice; choice and decentralisation. It isn't being an identifiable individual that scares us. It is centralised "big brother"-style databases that scare people. They cost a fortune, are big targets for fraud and are error-prone. Decentralised proof of identity doesn't suffer from the same problems. Say, for instance, you trust your bank to check your identity. You think that the PIN numbers and passwords are enough to protect your money - why not more? You let a central registry know that your identity is stored with your bank and if anyone needs to verify who you are then they check the central registry, find the bank is your chosen identity provider and ask them to verify you. You give your password and PIN number and the bank tells them that you are actually you.

If we require our government to only share information between departments via your identity provider, and give you the option to veto the transfer then we can protect our privacy too. Personally, we quite like the idea of being identifiable - it means that the government has to run things by us when it compromises our privacy.

We don't all need an ID card to prove who we are. We need the ability to choose how we wish to identify ourselves and have a way to share our choice with others.