Kevin Saulsbury's List: Digital Identity

Digital identity is the online representation of an individual within a community, as adopted by that individual and/or projected by others.  An individual may have multiple digital identities in multiple communities.

Digital identity is a psychological identity that prevails in the domains of cyberspace, and is defined as a set of data that uniquely describes a person or a thing (sometimes referred to as subject or entity) and contains information about the subject's relationships to other entities.^[1] The social identity that an internet user establishes through digital identities in cyberspace is referred to as online identity.

 

A critical problem in cyberspace is knowing with whom you are interacting. In essence, the problem is that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Currently there are no ways to precisely determine the identity of a person in digital space. Even though there are attributes associated to a person's digital identity, these attributes or even identities can be changed, masked or dumped and new ones created. Despite the fact that there are many authentication systems and digital identifiers that try to address these problems, there is still a need for a unified and verified identification system in cyberspace.^{[2][not in citation given]} Thus, there are issues of privacy and security related to digital identity.