Tech

Over 500 Million Smartphone Owners Expected to Use Digital Identity Wallets by 2026

According to a new report, more than 500 million smartphone users worldwide will regularly use a digital identity wallet (DIW) by 2026 to confirm things about themselves. This major change shows how important it is when we trust people online that we can check they are who they say they are—especially when they don’t have official papers or enough of them.

The old way of doing this kind of verification—taking photos of our faces and sending them off with ID documents again and again—doesn’t seem good enough anymore. This has led to the rise of portable digital identities (PDIs) as solutions. While these are still quite new, Akif Khan from Gartner thinks we will see less and less demand for the kind of checks that need lots of separate information because an idea like PDI can be carried from one system into another as many times as its rightful owner wishes. Akif Khan works at Gartner; he is one of the VPs there, analyzing things such as markets and what they are going to be like in future years!

Current methods of identity verification (IDV) tend to concentrate on basic identity information—for example, your name, date of birth, and where you live. But as more and more parts of our lives move online, there is an increasing need for other kinds of IDV.

This could include details about your education and employment history or even things like health records.A personal digital identity (PDI) is a concept that would bring all these different types of identity checks together. When fully developed, a PDI would allow someone to prove ‘who they are’ in a digital context while retaining control over their personal security and privacy settings.

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At the core of the idea is the belief that individuals should be able to choose when and where third parties access their digital identity for verification purposes. If a person does verify their identity in this way, one needs to know about it. One option would be for these kinds of ‘identity assertions’ to be kept centrally by big institutions. But some think it’s more exciting for users themselves to store this information in a decentralized way—for example, on their own smart phone. The European Commission has announced plans that within five years (by 2026), each member country ought to provide citizens with their own secure Digital Identity Wallets (DIW).