How can companies verify if their customer is who he or she claims to be? Passwords, phone numbers, email addresses, facial scans, etc., can and have been used as identifiers. But such identifiers can be stolen and misused and the damage done by such actions can only multiply as more and more of the business of life in conducted online. To make matters even more complex, people’s identities don’t stay static but evolve over time forcing data security companies to evolve along with them.
Kelly Sheridan outlines the need for better identity management systems in this report from DarkReading:
We need to move toward a world in which machines recognize us by the way we interact with them, he continues, but the problem is this requires participatory surveillance. People have to volunteer personal and behavioral information (fingerprint, typing cadence) so devices will recognize them. On top of that, we don’t have a common language to explain to consumers and employees how this recognition works and why it’s necessary.
“If you want the individual to be an active participant in the process, it is incumbent they understand what the process is,” he says. It’s also incumbent on businesses to use the information appropriately and for its intended purposes.
When Duo Security’s (Wendy) Nather thinks about the future of identity in a business-to-business context, she says trusted intermediaries will surface to handle the exchange of identity data between parties. If several companies in one industry have trusted intermediaries specific to that sector, they will be more likely to use that organization to handle identities among companies in the space.
