As you’d be aware, the initial enthusiasm for the internet has been replaced with the sweeping realization that it has evolved in a way that is negative for its users. Big Data analytics technology is being used to commercialize knowledge about user behaviors, and influence and shape those behaviors. Big Tech companies use sophisticated analytic technology to analyze, predict, and manipulate user behavior while profiting at each step. Data breaches disclose our personal information at a scale never seen before. We say it often: we are in the midst of a privacy crisis.
Big Tech companies can leverage many sources of information, but perhaps the most important is digital exhaust. This is user-generated data harvested from users’ daily interactions with online sites and services. These interactions include every action users take – Facebook likes, Google searches, tweets, emails, text messages, photos, songs, videos, location and movement, and purchases. What’s more, this digital exhaust spans all aspects of a person’s life – family, community, professional and the deeply personal, such as medical and health – reducing privacy and anonymity right when a person might want them most. Interactions are captured, abstracted, aggregated, packaged, analyzed and sold.
Users are unwittingly even helping Big Tech to correlate their digital exhaust by providing unique personal identifiers every time they give their email address, phone number, or credit card details.
But there is a solution.
The Sudo is a privacy-protecting digital identity
Anonyome Labs envisions a world where personal data is secure and under the exclusive control of the individual; where people have the tools to create personalized identities that match the context and content they wish to share in particular environments. We believe being private doesn’t mean opting out of online services or hiding from the world. We empower people to determine what information they share, and how, when and with whom they share it.
To help protect personal information, Anonyome Labs created the concept of a Sudo, a digital identity that users can take into the world and use in place of their personal information.
Users have found it simple to use digital identities for many scenarios in their daily physical and digital lives. Some digital identities are long lived, while some are short lived. Some users have one digital identity, while others have many digital identities.
Digital identities make it easy to compartmentalize activities that a user may engage in with different people, services, or applications under a specific identity. This puts the user’s information in their control because it cannot be easily correlated to either their personal identity or their other digital identities.
Digital identities are suitable across a vast array of online and offline scenarios such as dating, shopping, classifieds selling, social networking, and web searching.
Creating a privacy-protecting digital identity has some very important fundamental characteristics:
- User Control (Always): Digital identities should be under the user’s control. The user should be able to create them, decide when to use them, and know when they have been used.
- Situational Personas: A user should be able to have more than one digital identity. The user can decide at any time which digital identity they want to use.
- Secure: Digital identities should be secure, not forgeable, and prevent impersonation by another user.
- Easy Device Synchronization: Digital identities should be available to a user on multiple devices and be able to be backed up and restored.
- Selectable Disclosure: A user should be able to control what data about their digital identity they disclose to a service.
- Deletable: A user should be able to delete their digital identity at any time, including any information on its use and any information associated with it.
Through the Sudo Platform, the MySudo app, and other partner apps, Anonyome Labs provides digital identities to everyday users so they can go out into the world with enhanced privacy and safety.
Next week, in part 2, we’ll explain how to use the Sudo Platform to deliver customer privacy solutions.
Photo by Buravleva stock
