Your digital identity is how you prove who you are online, but it’s also so much more. A person’s digital identity is the sum of all digitally available information about that person, and that data accretes over time.

Think about that. In an era when computers remember us forever, and all data is digital, wouldn’t it stand to reason that our identity would have real value, and that value would grow over time as our data grows over time? We’re talking about the total sum of everything a person does, everywhere a person goes, everyone a person talks too, including user attributes, personal identifiers, transactions of all kinds, and metadata types from administrative to structural. This is a person’s complete history, their identity graph. What else is there but our identity?

This is who we are:

What’s The Problem With Digital Identity?

The problem with digital identity is that, “You are a social ID-slave by default today” and “Identity is being utilized presently as an industrial control system”, as put by moxytongue here and here, respectively. The internet has become a tool for mass data aggregation and we have no control over our digital identities, or the personal data and value our identities produce. “It is time for us all to take charge of our personal data!”, says Dr. Alex “Sandy” Pentland, ID3 Chief Scientist and Co-founder.

What happened? How did we get here? Well, the problems started in the beginning – the internet was built without an identity layer: “The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to. This limits what we can do with it and exposes us to growing dangers. If we do nothing, we will face rapidly proliferating episodes of theft and deception that will cumulatively erode public trust in the Internet,” wrote Kim Cameron in 2005 in The Laws of Identity

The centrally controlled identity systems encouraged by this lack of internet identity layer serve only the convenience of organizations, and are not intended for user-centric applications.

“Our main problem with identity in the digital world is that we started with no personal control at all. Everything we did with identity began with organizations’ need to put names in databases. That served the administrative convenience of those organizations – and our convenience only to the degree that we are known separately to all the organizations that know us.” – Doc Searls, Self-Sovereign Identity

Final Thoughts

The digital identity crisis we face today is not merely a technical problem—it’s a fundamental question about human autonomy in the digital age. We’ve sleepwalked into a world where our most intimate details, our daily patterns, our connections, and our choices are harvested, stored, and monetized by entities we barely understand, through systems we never consented to design.

The absence of an identity layer in the internet’s architecture wasn’t just an oversight; it created a vacuum that has been filled by surveillance capitalism and institutional control. Every click, every purchase, every interaction adds to an ever-growing dossier that we neither own nor control. This isn’t just about privacy—it’s about power, agency, and what it means to be human in a digital society.

But recognition of this problem is the first step toward reclaiming our digital selves. The growing awareness that our digital identities have become industrial control systems rather than tools of personal empowerment is sparking a crucial conversation about alternatives. Whether through self-sovereign identity solutions, decentralized systems, or new regulatory frameworks, the path forward must prioritize individual control and consent.

The question isn’t whether we need to fix digital identity—it’s whether we’ll act before the current system becomes so entrenched that change becomes impossible. Our digital identities are too valuable, too personal, and too important to remain pawns in someone else’s game. The time to reclaim them is now.

Thanks for reading!