Online Identity Management

Data is being collected about you -- that much is undeniable. The common misconception is that your personally identifiable data (PII) resides natively in some single, centralized database. Clearly, Facebook is one of the most aggressive collectors of behavioral data and aggregated inferences about the personal information people post -- although it accuses others of "harvesting" this data. Indeed, social media's ability to influence public perceptions and opinion may have already changed the course of world history.

Personal identity is the amalgam of information necessary for you, or anyone seeking to impersonate you, to be recognized as valid and to be authenticated. Someone stealing a password to a DMV database might be able to attain information about your driver's license or the make and model of car you drive. If that's enough information for someone else, in some other transaction, to pass this person off as you, then that malicious actor may have effectively "stolen your identity."

Identity management, therefore, consists of the practices and principles to which everyone in the transaction process adheres, including yourself, to protect those elements of digital identity that may be combined by a malicious actor to utilize your personal identity. Identity and access management (IAM) is the class of software and services on the computer networks' side of the transaction, dedicated to fulfilling their responsibilities to you in that regard.