Soft Identities, the new challenge for the digital citizen

The role of identity is extremely important in our society. On the basis of our identities we are allowed or denied to perform every day vital operations. Digital identity is a concept that prevails in the domains of cyberspace, and is defined as a set of data that uniquely describes a person or a thing (a.k.a. subject or entity) and contains information about the subject's relationships to other entities. The social identity that an internet user establishes through digital identities in cyberspace is referred to as online identity. The concept of digital identity has been extended recently with a sort of inheritance principle: in smart home environments users con figure their devices using their own credentials, giving these devices full rights to operate as if they are the users themselves. In a certain way we can say that smart devices inherit the identity of their owner. Scope of this short paper is that of raising the attention on the privacy threats related to soft-identity in the modern digital world.

NAI FOVINO Igor; 

2013-11-21

European Commission

JRC85268

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC85268,