The web and cloud need an identity layer for folks to offer us more control over our sprawling digital identities.

There was a time for those who were identified by two pieces of knowledge: your phone number and your address. But with the increase of social apps, mobile, and massive data, your identity — now your digital identity — is much more complex.

Your digital identity features a staggering amount of knowledge. Every mastercard transaction, uploaded photo, shared social post, social login, sent email, and placement cookie shapes our digital identity. It is all available somewhere within the cloud.

Much of this gets linked and correlated (often through social logins or other identifiers comparable to phone numbers and email addresses), and the combination effectively represents you online — that’s your digital identity — and provides you wonderfully personalized services and precisely targeted ads. But you do not own your digital identity — or at the very least you do not manage or control it.

[Within the next five years, expect vendors to roll out digital-self services. Read How are you going to Manage Your Digital Self?]

As our digital identity becomes more useful and more accurate, there are both concerns and excitement concerning the new value it creates. The British research firm Quocirca published a report last year detailing BYOID, or Bring Your personal Identity, discussing how employers are using social and third-party SaaS logins to interchange or augment enterprise identity, and the way identity brokers — meaning companies that establish the holistic view of the client through insights and analytics — add degrees of verification through social graphs and digital information.

In other words, who you might be is increasingly cross-linked across multiple domains, in multiple dimensions, or even across your real-life persona.

Closer to home, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) demands what it dubbed the Identity Ecosystem, a digital environment built on clearly defined guidelines for the use/access of private data by individuals and companies. The Identity Ecosystem shall be defined as successful provided that it really is enhances privacy and is voluntary, secure, resilient, interoperable, cost-effective, and straightforward to apply.

That’s all well and good, but what does that mean for consumers and organizations?

First, though no agency is yet ready to have a holistic view of your digital identity, the possibility of the linkages are technically there, and that’s the overall direction we’re headed — find it irresistible or not.

Second, it signifies that individuals need more control over their digital identities. The NSTIC may spark some paradigms for this. And the web industry, in addition to regulators, are debating the correct how to ensure security, privacy, and private data control. Simultaneously, they’re allowing the personalization of online services and the economy that drives the supply of these services, which to an exceptional extent is fueled by the very data that makes up our digital identity.

But none of this addresses the core question of ownership and control of one’s digital identity. And, really, it can’t. Our digital identities will not be something integral that reside in a single place. Rather, they’re spread across our online data and identifiers, and most of that belongs to the services we use.

It’s possible that the net and the cloud want a new layer — an identity layer for folk and organizations — identical to the identity layer for web pages (DNS) that built the net as we all know it. Today, we do not have an identical service that permits us to find people and organizations (or things, for that matter). We will be able to do that within a social app or a proprietary web app, but we cannot try this around the whole web.

Such a layer would help us get control over our digital identities. As an instance, it is going to let us link and share our various cloud identities (comparable to social identities, SaaS logins, and other identifiers comparable to phone numbers) and knowledge. Through federation and other delegation, we are able to assert control over our identities and knowledge via a graph. Those aware of gateways, DNS, and RDF graphs will see how these concepts may be joined together, in order that a discoverable identity could act as an authorization manager for the entire cloud-based assets involving our identity.

As our lives move online and our digital identities achieve a type of power they never had before, we have to own our digital identities. Easy methods to do so is thru an online infrastructure that rides above the applications we consume on the net. We will be able to finally have durable digital identities, and since we control access to our personal clouds via these identities, we’ll be capable to control our own privacy threshold.

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Dr. Bregman is liable for Neustar’s product technology strategy and product development efforts. Before joining Neustar in 2011, he was Executive Vp and Chief Technology Officer of Symantec since 2006, where he developed the company’s technology strategy … View Full Bio

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