In the wake of the huge Equifax data breach, which compromised the personal information of 145.5 million U.S. consumers, the Trump administration asked federal departments and agencies to do something bold: Come up with a new identity system that does not rely on overexposed and octogenarian Social Security numbers.
Other countries already enjoy just this kind of society in which there’s no unique nine-digit number that holds the key to anyone’s economic identity. The problem might not be imagining a world without Social Security numbers but surveying other systems to pick, and perhaps adapt, the best ones.
“The U.S. doesn’t have to totally reinvent the wheel here,” said Daniel Castro, director of the Center for Data Innovation, a think tank.
Rob Joyce, special assistant to the president and White House cybersecurity coordinator, suggested at a recent conference in Washington that an improved system might involve technologies such as a “modern cryptographic identifier.”
And in fact other countries already embrace blockchain and biometrics as backbones for government and private-sector systems. Often these tools are used in tandem with other authentication techniques to verify a citizen’s identity, provide easy access to services, and keep a permanent record of interactions. Whether these technologies now gaining momentum will prove enough protection against future cyberattacks will be the story to watch over the next few years.
Here are some of the ways governments outside the U.S. have set up modern identity systems that allow citizens to share and protect their personal information.
Trusting The Blockchain With Identities
“One of the world’s most developed digital societies” is how Estonia describes itself on its e-estonia.com website. After a nationwide cyberattack in 2007, the government began moving toward a blockchain-based system developed by an Estonian company to secure and protect its data and systems. Blockchain is software that supports a sort of public ledger, albeit an encrypted one, that stores data that cannot be erased or rewritten without leaving a record of the previous data.
Estonia’s eHealth Authority is working on putting its citizens’ medical records on blockchain. Dubai, another early government adopter of blockchain technology, plans to do the same with medical records and have all government documents on the blockchain by 2020.
Estonian ID cards, which have an electronic chip, can be used to vote, bank online, get a prescription, file taxes, apply for state benefits, and much more. The cards require two PIN codes: the first is to authenticate an identity; the second acts as a digital signature. When the person is linked with whatever resource they’re using, the data are preserved on the blockchain.