July 13,2009
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How Safe is Electronic Identity?, Pt.1
Is He or Isn't He?There are two main sources of information paramount to the identity verification and management process. The first is attributed identity. Organizations like credit card companies rely heavily on attributed identity information which includes the individual's name, social security number, date of birth, birthplace, parents' names, mother's maiden name, and other birth certificate information. A second source of valuable information is known as biographical identity information. Whereas the credit card customer's attributed identity never changes, biographical information changes from time to time and includes such things as achieved education level, place of residency, employment, and in some cases, even other credit card accounts.
As mentioned earlier, during the initial credit card application process, two elements form the basis of establishing an individual's identity; validity and verification. Identifying whether or not a person exists is easily accomplished when using attributed identity information. With today's world of communication, birth records and social security records can be verified within minutes. This presents credit card consumers with a vulnerability of a different proportion and requires organizations to depend more heavily on biographical information that may not be as readily accessible by the public. Therefore, verifying that a person is truly who he claims to be is a much more difficult task. When doing so, organizations attempt to query questions from the consumer that only he/she would know the answer.
In today's electronic world, both attributed and biographical identity information is stored electronically in most organization's database. Organizations like credit card companies do so because it is more difficult to falsify information in multiple databases than it is to tamper with paper documents. Furthermore, electronic information is generally more current because it provides the capabilities of merging large portions of information into other databases. This last point makes it very difficult for hackers to provide current, accurate, and historical information to banks during the application process.