Stolen identity is the number one security issue online. This is because identity is always the weakest link. If you want to get past the gate? Identity is where you do it.
COVID-19 has pushed global society even further online while our ability to know who we’re talking to, remains in the dark ages.
Online identity solutions are still trying to bridge the digital and the real world. In our most advanced efforts, we try to compare photos of regional credentials. We try to see if someone doctored a photo, or if they provided fraudulent identifying information. At some point, you gotta ask something only that person would know, something private — but of course, if you’re just going to pay someone to look that up? How private is it?
Which is the whole problem.
We are degrading our collective potential for greater privacy by storing, reviewing and copying private information over and over again.
We’re pushing our private lives around the internet from person to person because we must pay someone to pass value judgment over our most intimate confidential information in order to apply for jobs, hire babysitters and conduct our daily lives online.
Consider that when your average Nanny website wants to verify identity? They run credit, or perform criminal background checks, which all sounds nice — but results are fuzzy and unreliable, they fail altogether when you are 16 years old or recently immigrated or just don’t have a lot of bank loans and rental history.
In terms of privacy? Imagine that a Nanny site must hire some “identity” company, so those employees review all this highly privileged stuff like criminal history or whatever embarrassing things they can dig up about you. Then these same employees aggregate your private life into a file they store and then they toss all that stuff back to the Nanny site. At this time even MORE people pour over your most sensitive information so they can pass value judgment on it, and decide if you deserve a credibility badge or if you should just be kicked off the site. This process takes days.
It’s no wonder there is such liability involved. This crude procedure begs for privacy violations, lawsuits and irreparable loss of customer trust.
Identity fraud is so pervasive, we’ve become wholly desensitized.
Endless online profiles masquerading as real people is not just responsible for fake restaurant reviews, bad dates and online bullies. The ability to shirk accountability online has become the favored route for perpetrating crimes ranging from fraud or theft to extortion, rape and murder.
Do we think anyone would be tempted by SPAM if the sender were visible, here in the real world?
We are swimming in an ocean of online identity fraud.
When we see Twitter or Facebook dragged before US Congress — this is not because they hate authenticity, or loath accountability — any manual review of private information over millions of users is impossible. In fact, it would take about 22 years to manually process all the profiles on Twitter, creating an endless mess of undue privacy violations and litigation.
Only automatic and unbiased verification that performs equality for all persons can solve this scourge on our global society today.
