Personal Identity Management to Put an End to the Data Breaches – Ensuring the Security of Consumer’s Private Data

By Rohanish Chavan

The consumer data market has increased significantly over the past few years. In the world of digitalization, a consumer prefers to buy products online. The data about the customer’s search and the history of products is saved. This data helps the analyst in understanding the needs of the consumer and their desires, in order to improve marketing, increase loyalty, and deliver better products. But several trends are converging which has created a major shift in how an analyst gains the access and uses the consumers’ data.

Recently there have been many incidents regarding data breaches, where the average incident company reported a costing of nearly $214 per customer records. Sony has reported that the breaches it suffered for the data from PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment nearly costed them hundreds of millions excluding the lawsuits that were filed by the consumers who were affected by the breach. It has become fundamentally difficult to hold the ownership of the consumer data. In order to curb these breaches, a mutually beneficial management called as personal identity management (PIDM) has been introduced. This management include the processes, standards, and the rules by which any individual or organizations manage, share, and use thee personal data and identity of their consumer with another individual or organizations.

The four types of personal data that come under the personal identity management include ­

• Full Name

The data procured from it include the location based on the mobile app usage. This helps in calculating the credit score of the individual and their intent of purchase can be determined.

• Social security number

This gives the purchase history of the customer, their past transactions, sales, and other related information. This helps in deriving the property score or the net worth of that particular individual. Using the social security number, it is easy to track their activity on social media platforms.

• National ID number

Non-identifiable web-browsing history can be easily obtained by retrieving an individual’s national ID number. It describes the persona of an individual and it becomes easy to determine the user-related content such as ratings and reviews.

• Driver’s license number

The information from the driver’s license can be helped in order to determine the travel preferences on the customer. Their archetypes can be determined from this information.

The segment of personal information is bifurcated in two segments­ a) government-maintained database of personally identifiable information (PII), b) models that promote individual maintenance of their total personal data histories that could include information of transactions. The combination of these two segments would provide a framework that would be understandable to consumers and will not require changes to the existing application programming interface (APIs). The concept of personal data lockers (PDL) and commercial data lockers (CDL) can be introduced. The PDL can server different purposes that can be governed by t he common set of standard protocols. They could typically hold the access to user’s data and will gain traction with data that is least frequently managed or has fewer cases of regulatory guidance. The CDL can be managed by the data service providers. They can charge fee for identity verification or for accessing consumer data information.

The privacy policies that are based on the Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Information Practice Principles left the consumers at the mercy of the organizations. These guidelines literally gave the firms free rein to draft their own liberal policies with hardly any room for consumers to exercise their own privacy preferences. With the integration of personal identity management, the consumer is given in-depth information about the company policies. The firms are restricted to only store the data that is they need which protects the private data of the consumer. This has significantly increased the transparency of the company policies and how they use the information of their customers. The integration of PIDM demands data transparency from the organizations.

• Organizations need to enable their systems that would support a potential influx of their customers if they demand a copy of their personal data. The data may include appended information, personally identifiable information, and transactional information.
• The consumers should have the access to their personal information and have the rights to append, correct, and delete data of their own will.
• The communication between the customer and the organization should be absolute. This would greatly help in delivering the information and new updates from the organization to their consumers. Furthermore, the loyalty of the customers would be boosted if their queries and problems are resolved quickly.

Several enterprises and corporation have invested in personal identity as its benefits far exceed its drawbacks. After exhaustive research, Allied Market Research has estimated that the global personal identity market would garner $23.04 billion by 2022, growing exponentially at a CAGR of 16.7% from 2014 to 2022. The market of personal identity has great potential and will increase at a steady pace as new technologies and innovative products are introduced in this market.

Rohanish Chavan is a content writer, working on a large marketing and sales platform that helps firms attract visitors and close customers. Proficient monitoring and evaluating search results and search performance in order to write market reports and editorials sums up his job description. He keeps his technical skills and knowledge up to date to optimize the social media updates and industry changes. In his free time, he also writes short stories, poems, and blogs in order to cultivate his writing prowess.