Digital identity

In the digital age, electronic signing has become an everyday tool for both businesses and individuals, enabling documents to be signed quickly, securely, and from anywhere. Today, e-signing goes beyond simply adding a visual signature as an image to a document. It involves using electronic methods to confirm the authenticity of a document or transaction and to verify the identity of the signer.

Within the last 4 articles of my blog series I have learned a lot, Agrello has grown and I hope I have given a hint of a new perspective to our readers on how the internet influences our activities. We have learned what are digital personas and how to protect and secure the personas that should link to a real person. This article will summarize the findings and make suggestions on how to inject trust into the World Wide Web.

The last article explained the mechanics of legally valid and provable consent by electronic means. However, the methods explained in the previous article require diligence from the parties to make sure that the consent is legally solid and representable. Current article explains technological methods, that assure trust by default. I must mention right away, this article is not meant to be deeply technological, thus some use of terminology can be arguable in scientific context.

I set out to collect people’s thoughts on a popular topic called digital identity and I was happy to learn that most people seem to agree with digital identity being more than just two entities communicating with each other. Like most people, I believe it means so much more. My thoughts went further, thinking about what connects digital identity to our real selves? In search of insights triggered by my thoughts and curiosity, I came across a short article from 7 years ago published by some MIT scientists. In this article, the authors presented a digital persona theory that pretty much answered most of my questions. However, it also raised ethical concerns on current social networks. To explain what ‘digital persona’ means and how it relates to digital identities, I put together a thought experiment, so please bear with me.