Technology’s Great Blind Spot: Reliable Digital Identity

We live in an era where technology can achieve incredible things.

AI can write, create, diagnose, and predict. Smartphones can unlock with our faces. Cars can drive themselves. Nearly everything we do is faster, smarter, and more connected than ever.

But for all these advances, there’s one critical problem technology still hasn’t solved: real-world identity, which remains fuzzy.

Despite all our apps, platforms, and digital tools, proving who someone really is—online—remains deeply fragmented and unreliable. We still create new accounts for every service, repeat the same form-filling rituals, and scatter pieces of our identity across countless databases. Control over personal information is weak at best, and transparency is almost nonexistent.

With the explosive rise of AI, this problem is only getting worse.

Synthetic identities, deepfakes, and convincing impersonations are now easier than ever to create. Attackers can leverage our fragmented digital footprints and overshared data to convincingly pretend to be anyone, opening the door to a new wave of fraud, scams, and identity-based attacks.

It’s a strange paradox:

We can teach machines to imitate our voices, generate our likenesses, and predict our next move—yet we still can’t reliably prove that someone online is who they claim to be.

Until we address this fundamental challenge, every breakthrough will bring new risks. It’s time for a new approach to digital identity—one built for the age of AI that prioritizes security and privacy. The future of online trust depends on it.