Trust Management: Social vs. Digital Identity

Introduction

Trust and identity are the essential needs to survive in the society. Identity helps in the recognizing process of our society, while trust helps to these identities to communicate, interact and transact each other effectively and efficiently in the most natural way. For any type of communication, interaction or transaction, whether a physical interaction (face to face or handshake or eye to eye contact) between individuals or a virtual interaction in the online environment, trust and identity remain the essential requirements. Trust management will manage and maintain the level of trust between individual identities, and helps them, to build a long live relationships or good business transactional relationships between each other. According to World Development Indicators (2017), World total population in 2000 was 6,118.2 million, which has increased to 7,530.4 million in 2017. This is estimated that by 2025, this population will reach to 8,036.4 million. With the increasing number of people in society to interact and communicate with each other with healthy relationships, the need for trust will grow. Therefore, trust will be required for healthy relationships, communication and better interaction among people. On the other side, the digital population of the world is also increasing. The ICT facts presented by International Telecommunication Union (2017), gives a glimpse of the increased penetration of ICT. The Mobile-cellular telephone subscriptions raised from 4.0% to103.5%, individuals using the internet increased from 20.5% to 48.0% and the fixed broadband subscriptions raised from 5.2% to 13.1%. According to this ITU (207) statistics, number of internet users were only 495 million in 2001 with a penetration of 8%, which has grown to 3385 million with a penetration of 45.9% in 2016. Which is further expected to increase to 3578 million in 2017, with a penetration of 48%.

ICTs will play even more vital role in the development agenda and in achieving future sustainable development goals as the world moves faster and faster towards a digital society. In the race of development, people across the world are using various digital technologies and devices like telephone, mobile, computer, laptops, tablets, broadband internet, etc. This increased number of digital or internet users in the world, will ultimately increase the number of digital identities in the world. These digital identities need to communicate with each other effectively and efficiently, for that they need to trust each other. So, the necessity of trust becomes more important in this digital environment. Identity is described as “one or more attributes which are applicable to this particular subject or object”. A user can hold many identities and each identity can be assigned to many of his / her attributes (Bhardwaj & Kumar, 2018; Pradhan & Kumar, 2016). Rittinghouse et al. (2010) refer digital identity as a set of attributes, which describes an individual in the digital environment. It refers to traits, attributes, and preferences on which one may receive personalized services. Identity traits might include government issued IDs, corporate user accounts, biometric information etc. Identity, presence and location are three characteristics that live at the core of the most emerging technologies today like real-time communication and cloud computing. Identity is a set of attributes, which describes an individual in the digital space, Presence describes the state of a user’s interactions with a systems such as computer they are accessing and location refers to the user’s physical address and typically includes from which country, place or city they access the internet in digital environment. Authentication and authorization mechanisms define on determining the “who” of identity, location defines the “where” and presence defines the “what” in the digital environment.