Who is managing my ID?

Also, comes a legitimacy question. Who is responsible for managing the citizens’ identities? The Anglo Saxon answer, mainly in the US, is “anyone but the government”, whereas the European answer leans more towards being more trustful into the government than into major companies. When business becomes global, identity management has to become global too. A step has been done in this direction in the real world with the ICAO standard guaranteeing interoperability of ePassports. A lot remains to be done in cyberspace. The US government is taking some initiatives to regulate identity management, but Europeans are not ready to have their identity managed along US government rules.

The emergence of a combination of public and private initiatives in various geographies is an urgent call for standardization. Otherwise, a large part of humanity is to suffer form schizophrenia, due too many identities to manage. Proving one’s identity is bound to be a lot more difficult in the XXIst century than it was in the XXth.

Thierry Spanjaard

Chief Editor

Smart Insights