Learning Digital Identity

Chapter 2. Defining Digital Identity

The family therapist Salvador Minuchin declared, “The human experience of identity has two elements: a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate.”¹ This is as good a description of digital identity as it is of our psychological identity. A digital identity contains data that uniquely describes a person or thing but also contains information about the subject’s relationships to other entities.

To see an example of this, consider the data record that represents your car, stored somewhere in your state or country’s computers. This record, commonly called a title, contains a vehicle identification number (VIN) that uniquely identifies the car. In addition, it contains other attributes of the car such as year, make, model, and color. The title also contains relationships: most notably, the title relates the vehicle to a person who owns it.² In many places, the title is also a historical document, because it identifies every owner of the car from the time it was made, as well as whether it’s been in a flood or otherwise salvaged.

While fields as diverse as philosophy, commerce, and technology define identity, most are not helpful in building, managing, and using digital identity systems. Instead, we need to define identity functionally, in a way that provides hooks for us to use in making decisions and thinking about problems that arise in digital identity.

Joe Andrieu, principal at Legendary Requirements, writes that “identity is how we recognize, ...