The potential for broad-scope "electronic agents" —preprogrammed service aggregators and self-organizing databases with proactive marketing capability—, aiding in everyday information-related activities, will require a new security standard to prevent identity theft, which could become one of the gravest threats to economic performance and individual liberty.
Digital IDs will have to be maintained through unbreakable private information management systems, entirely parallel to and separate from the information actually sent, which will behave as a single identifying set of characteristics for a given internet user, when ID is called for.
Individuals will be able to use a complex array of mental-reference data, unique to personal knowledge, to block hackers' access to the actual management system itself, which will allow users to take instant corrective-protective action in case of hacked or apparently compromised online IDs.
The main purpose of this service would be to achieve security of personal data by securely matching real personal data with an official, singular digital ID, containing none of the real ID data. Thus, there would exist an impenetrable barrier (semantic separation) between sensitive personal ID data and the malicious intent of those who may seek to misuse it.
