Your digital identity is critical to accessing electronic resources, but to truly unlock the economic and social potential of the Internet, services that are still only being conducted offline must be brought online. However, these services require systems that provide a high level of confidence about a person’s identity, which an effective digital identity management should provide.
You wish to conduct following activities over the Internet: send an email; order a book; or even transfer some funds from your savings to chequing account. Even before you are allowed to perform any of those actions, you must first register on the respective website and establish an identity online. The website owner then assigns you certain privileges to use facilities available through the website. Thereafter, whenever you log in, your registration details are used to authenticate you as the authorised account holder, and if successful, you are allowed to carry out the desired transaction.
Increasingly persons are required to follow a formal access procedure in order to secure a particular facility or service. However, there are still several critical services that are not yet available over the Internet, especially in the Caribbean, because of the systems to provide the necessary assurance about person’s identity online are absent. This post examines the digital identity and identifies some of key considerations in managing it.
What is a digital identity?
The term digital identity (ID) is used in different ways, but in the context relevant to this discussion, it refers to an entity, including humans, devices, digital resources and computers, being represented in the electronic space. With regard to people, a digital ID would be the online equivalent of each individual person that participates in electronic transactions on behalf of the person in question. More
