New fancy integration, digital signatures, etc are still protecting a process that’s unreliable fundamentally. It’s all anchored to your birth certificate, and in the US that’s controlled by thousands of jurisdictions with varying competence.
The most secure scenarios (cleared employees), tie your credentials to biometrics, and vet your origin as a control for fraud. Everything else increases the risk of fraud as a trade off for convenience or privacy. (Your cellphone carrier doesn’t need to vet where you went to elementary school)
It works for the requirements of the people who are running it, not necessarily those who use it.
The differentiator is that when an incompetent jurisdiction gives away your ID, it's your loss, not theirs. When hackers spoof a business with your credentials to perform industrial espionage or plant ransomware, it's the business that loses, not you. An incompetent jurisdiction can continue operation indefinitely, they just have unhappy, powerless citizens. An incompetent business will suffer financial losses and fail.
The village clerk in some Indian reservation in South Dakota probably doesn’t have a process that looks like the NYC department of Health for vital records. But people live for a long time, and errors and omissions do too.
The point is, you can establish identity, but it’s a pain in the ass. I need to provide a drivers license to open a savings account, but anyone with my SSN can open a credit card.
Any day now Equifax is going down. The real difference is that humans have some institutional power over political jurisdictions and how they are run and exactly none over how (large enough) businesses are.
New fancy integration, digital signatures, etc are still protecting a process that’s unreliable fundamentally. It’s all anchored to your birth certificate, and in the US that’s controlled by thousands of jurisdictions with varying competence.
The most secure scenarios (cleared employees), tie your credentials to biometrics, and vet your origin as a control for fraud. Everything else increases the risk of fraud as a trade off for convenience or privacy. (Your cellphone carrier doesn’t need to vet where you went to elementary school)