There was a time when people worried about losing their wallet.
At this time, the wallet may not be the most important item you have.
Your identity may be!
A recent report on a dark-web service offering over 153 million copies of driver's licenses has brought to light a topic that many of us don't often consider: what information we give out to companies just to be considered “human.” The FBI is working on the case of the alleged breach and the extent of the exposure and the final source have yet to be determined.
But this is no ordinary cyber security tale.
It may be a warning of the direction in which the internet is going.
The internet is becoming obsessed with proving who you are
Consider how often you've been asked to confirm your identity online.
Upload an ID.
Take a selfie.
Scan your face.
Please enter your birth date.
Verify your address.
These checks can be beneficial for financial exchanges, banks, and other services. They are useful for businesses to comply with laws and minimize fraud.
However, there's a not-so-sweet deal:
The greater the number of locations where you store your identity, the greater the number of locations where it can be lost.
The large scale (153 million documents) reported incident is particularly alarming because the data allegedly includes government-issued information such as ID documents, as well as other sensitive documents. The definitive extent and origin has yet to be fully determined and the headline figure is a reported total, not a final confirmed figure.
That's an important distinction.
However, even if the numbers change, the issue remains the same.
And AI makes the problem even more interesting
Digital verification is becoming more complex with the help of AI.
Automated systems can identify faces, scan documents and detect suspicious activity in seconds, allowing companies to detect and compare faces and documents.
Meanwhile, generative AI has been making it even easier to create fake images, fake documents and convincing impersonation attempts.
This leads to an unusual tech race:
It's a thing that AI is being deployed to establish your reality and then making it more difficult to establish what's real.
This is one of the largest digital-identity challenges facing the next few years.
Crypto has a surprisingly important role here
The concept of financial sovereignty has been a much-discussed topic among crypto fans for years.
But the other type of sovereignty that might be equally significant is:
identity sovereignty.
Some records are verifiable using blockchains without the need for every participant to have their own copy of the data.
The idea isn't necessarily to put your passport or driver's license on a public blockchain.
Quite the opposite.
A better future may be living up to something without giving up your whole identity file every time.
Imagine proving:
“I'm old enough.”
Without giving the exact date of your birth.
Or proving:
This account is verified to be a human.
Without handing over 10 different businesses a permanent copy of your identity documents.
That's where technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized identity become interesting.
The real question isn't “Blockchain or no blockchain?”
It's not the debate for you.
The real question, though, is:
What is the purpose of all this data being stored by every company about us?
Sure, a service may need to know you are over a particular age, but it doesn't need to know your entire ID.
Why should a platform be expected to keep the original documents on file for your forever?
Data minimization may be as crucial as encryption.
Once sensitive information is gathered, someone's got to be responsible for keeping it safe.
But history teaches one can't always be safe.
Meanwhile, AI infrastructure is exploding
There's another story from the screenshots that dovetails with it quite nicely.
NVIDIA's quarterly revenue was $96.2 billion, including $89 billion in data-center revenue, a 117% increase from the previous year.
That is a clue that much deeper than "NVIDIA is making money.
The tech and technology behind AI is expanding into massive proportions.
More AI is more automated verification, more digital agents, more online transactions, and perhaps more systems determining who we are.
So we're entering an interesting situation:
As our digital identities become more valuable, AI is getting better at comprehending them.As our digital identities become more valuable, AI is becoming better at comprehending our digital identities.
Your next “password” might not be a password
The internet began with usernames and passwords.
Then we had two-factor authentication.
After that we had biometrics.
Now there is a push for even more sophisticated methods that can continuously verify you based on any number of metrics.
The future of the internet could see a dramatic shift in how we do things.
No longer would we have to give out our documents to every company that wants a piece of our information.
It would all boil down to being able to assert facts about yourself to specific companies and institutions.
A seemingly simple change, this could revolutionize our online world.
The uncomfortable conclusion
The biggest digital asset you own could very well not be Bitcoin.
It could be your bank account.
Your social-media accounts?
No, actually.
What I'm saying is, it could be what gives you credibility.
If you have a driver's license with biometric information that gets leaked or compromised somehow, you can't just "reset" your identity like you could with a password.
This is why the recent identity breach story is actually important to people outside of cybersecurity.
Yes, the future of cryptocurrency lies in being able to conduct financial transactions without the banks.
But the future of the internet lies in being able to prove who you are without giving everyone your life.
And that is a problem I think we should solve before giving AI's more information on who we are.
If you enjoyed this perspective I would always appreciate a tip to help me continue researching and writing about the technology stories hidden beneath the surface.
