Identity management involves confirming, protecting, and using personal IDs, covering many disciplines. The goal is to create a unique personal profile for a user. Governments, businesses, and private groups use numbers for IDs, but lack a centralized system. Efforts focus on preventing security breaches and managing violations.
Identity (ID) management is a broad topic focused on confirming, protecting, and using personal IDs. This topic covers many disciplines, from computer science to social education. Any topic that has to do with safeguarding or using an individual identification method is part of ID management. The ultimate goal of this interdisciplinary process is the use of individual IDs to create a personal profile for a user. Using this profile, that person could shop, go to work, or perform any common activity without needing money or additional identification.
ID management theory involves taking an individual and breaking them down into quantifiable segments. Easy factors include age, gender, address, and other obvious factors. Then come more difficult factors such as likes and dislikes or personal tendencies. Finally, there are qualities that are not quantifiable by normal means, such as life goals and desires. If it were possible to take all of these factors into consideration and create a personal profile, that profile would have to be totally unique to that person.
In the absence of the technology to perform such a personal breakdown, governments, businesses and private groups are using other methods to create IDs. Often these are numbers, such as Social Security numbers used in the United States or employee identification numbers or usernames and access codes used to access private data. While these processes all have benefits, the lack of a centralized system makes it difficult to do true ID management.
One of the main goals of any ID management system is to keep IDs away from people who shouldn’t have them. With a typical identification system, any person with the correct information is assumed to be the person in question. Because this single security flaw can cause such a problem if exploited, much of any management system is focused on preventing or managing such an event.
From a preventative perspective, a lot of the effort goes into keeping IDs secure. This process is usually two-fold. Technically, IDs are kept in a separate system and usually encrypted in some way. This way, even if the ID system is compromised, the IDs may still be safe. Socially, ID holders are encouraged to change their passwords and use non-obvious combinations of letters and numbers.
When dealing with an ID handling violation, there are generally a wide variety of problems. The first problem is to prevent the breach from escalating in size or severity. This results in the ID being blocked and prohibited from using it for any purpose. Next, the owner of the ID must have their activities scrutinized so that any false use of the ID can be separated from the legitimate ones. The legitimate ID card holder needs a new ID card issued, and any malicious activity performed with the old ID card should be cancelled.
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