How Blockchain Our Personal Identity

by Fauzan Anandika

Today in the digital era, we were able to connect with everyone easily. Social media, websites, and the marketplace become a platform to meet people, even people we do not know. The internet gives a huge benefit but on the other hand also a serious risk, especially for our identity. Bad people try to manipulate people and steal identity by ordering to fill a form.

The identity that they steal can be used for buying goods and services. The thief also able to manipulate their criminal record or applying for credit. For internet users protecting identity is as safe as possible, preventing it by carefully submitted an online form. 

There is two way the theft steals personal data, first is by collecting out data from out garbage or mailbox. Sometimes we forget to destroy a document that contains personal data like full name, bank account, or credit card number when disposing of the garbage. The second one is by manipulating our minds to fill the online form. The theft manipulates a user’s mind by asking to fill a form to subscribe or sending a CV for the jobseeker. Internet users need to find out about the website’s credibility before submitting any data to the server. 

There is a way to prevent identity stealing activity. One of them is by using a blockchain in form submitting. Using blockchain, a user will get irreversible data as the identity to replace their data. There are some reasons why blockchain technology can prevent personal identity thievery. 

1. Irreversible data Identity 

Blockchain feature makes every data in the system cannot be edit and remove. The data will only refer to the actual performance. The system won’t need any personal data since the user id impossible to change. 

2. Protected by three actors

There are three important roles in the blockchain system, identity owners, identity issuers, and identity verifiers. When a transaction or activity occurs, these three roles will be validating the transaction. That means if a thief tries to steal data, they need to hack into these three actors. 

3. Inaccessibility

Using a decentralized identifier (DID) makes any user have no visible identifier. Each DID secure by a private key, where only the owner can access and control it. Each person can have more than one DID that connects to one kind of activity. These DID connect with a series of verified credentials issued by other DID. This connection will attest to the character of the DID like age, payment slip, education, or address. This mechanism allows DID owners to store these credentials by themselves without relying on a single profile provider like Google or Facebook. Having full control makes it impossible to access by other people.  

4. Using Two Way Keys

Every blockchain user provides two types of keys, private key, and public key. The private key use and known only by the owner, while the public key can be share for pairing activity purposes.

Even it still in the developing stage, blockchain implementation in securing personal information has a promising growth. A technology that could make any internet activity safer and more comfortable.