Creating Personalized Digital Identities Identity management registries use blockchain today to create wholesale identities and to verify credentials. In its current iteration, the registry establishes an individual’s identity and associates it with an iris scan. A registered refugee can enter a dispensary at a refugee camp and claim the food and goods apportioned to them by identifying themselves via scan.
In the company-to-customer relationship, the potential for transformation is enormous. One proposed solution is the development of a global, anonymous registry specifically designed to encourage personalization. People could register and create identities that shield all their PII while simultaneously revealing their accumulated shopping histories and preferences to anyone with a key.
If customers gain confidence that they can share information with marketers without risking data theft, the tables can flip for personalization. Marketers would no longer have to pay aggregators for semi-useful data shards, because customers would freely share their profiles to help marketers match their preferences.
Businesses might meet customers in a data-rich marketplace, or a registry might make profiles portable and enable customers to present their data key to their preferred businesses. Blockchain can also support that trust by associating every subsequent transaction with each individual profile, including any sharing of the data. This would build confidence, because customers could easily detect any data sharing.
This brave new world does not exist yet, and it is unclear who might build such registries. The question of who would control the data has an answer that is unique to blockchain: No one would control the data, just as no central authority operates Bitcoin. Blockchain stores data across multiple instances of an identical ledger that updates with each transaction and requires no separate data entry or management.
By developing ideas and forging partnerships, brands can help drive projects forward until they achieve critical mass and deliver transformative value. Any brand that can create actual trust-which is blockchain’s best selling point-can eliminate loss-of-privacy fears and liberate customers to embrace personalization as the ultimate consumer benefit.
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