Securing Your Digital Identity

Since everyone and their mothers are now using the internet for both personal and business functions, it is important that you know what a digital identity is and why you need a trust framework. To start off, a digital identity is an online representation of a certain individual, corporation and devices even. Simply put, it is your identity when you are online. So if you have a business that you're trying to market online, it also has a digital identity.


Like your real identity, digital identities also have issues regarding privacy, ownership and security. Now what does this mean? I'm sure you have heard of identity theft in the real world, which also happens in cyberspace also known as cyber fraud. What makes it alarming is that more and more businesses are harnessing the power of the internet which when you think about it is a buffet for unscrupulous people prowling around the web to get your company’s data. With the Open Identity Approach, we are given opportunities to have unverified Twitter accounts and we can also login to different social networking sites but the security risks are higher if you are doing online banking, e-health and government welfare.

The premise of an OpenID approach is that once our identity is verified by one site, we can go to another site and be logged in with the same identity. This is all fine for social media but if it happens also to other sites which holds our personal, sensitive information then it breaches our confidentiality. The bottomline here is the trust framework should be simple enough for people to understand so that cyber fraud and identity theft can be controlled and hopefully be diminished especially now that businesses rely heavily on the internet.