More and more lives are playing out online every day. Proving that someone is who he/she claims to be is becoming more difficult. Businesses are facing many challenges when it comes to establishing trust online.
Traditional ID Verification
Just a few years ago, proving your identity was a fairly straightforward process. You simply needed to have some form of physical identification. To go through immigration, for example, you just needed to present your identity card or passport. To hire a car, a valid driving license was all you required.
Electronic Identification
Proving your identity was once a relatively trivial matter. Nowadays, however, more and more people are playing out their lives online. The identity verification process, therefore, is becoming a lot more complicated. Online ID authentication is something most people must do on a weekly or daily basis.
In the digital environment, however, the physical ID documents people used to rely on are not much help. When signing up for a simple service such as opening a new social media account, for example, you will have to fill a series of online forms with your personal data. This includes information such as your email address, name, home address, date of birth, phone number, and more.
If you only had to do this just once, it would not be much of a problem. With the number of online services people access every day, however, you might have to repeat the process over and over again. Filling in the same data repeatedly in different locations can be inefficient and extremely frustrating.
It can have other implications as well, such as:
- Risk and security considerations
- Risk of analog ID verification
Trust
In the online world, trust is more than a lofty or good-to-have idea. Rather, it is one of the most important prerequisites for a dependable and truly online digital market. Without trust, the traditional process of verifying people’s identities will persist. This will cause increased consumer frustration, leading to loss of business for service providers.
Therefore, electronic identification is extremely beneficial. It is capable of overcoming most of the barriers standing service providers on one side of the equation, and consumers on the other side. In its simplest form, electronic identification is the digital equivalent of the physical forms of identification people use in the real world. However, eIDs are far more efficient and versatile.
Much like the traditional form of identifying people’s identity, an electronic ID is a set of attributes or elements relating to the holder.