How do you identify yourself? You can prove your identity by showing your personal ID card. After the millennium the most important identifier became our mobile phone number. Currently we can access an enormous amount of information thanks to a mobile. Nowadays, more and more we are using our passwords and after launch of iPhone 5 we use our fingertips to identify ourselves.
About three years ago, Rebekah Cox, an early product designer at Facebook and Quora, tweeted: “The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.” The tweet was widely-circulated, and given Cox’s experience, provoked thought. A day later, she expanded on her tweet by writing a longer post on Quora, titled “Mobile Identity: To start it’s important to understand what identity isn’t: Identity is not a password, it’s not root access, it’s not your calendar, it’s not your email, it’s not a technical achievement, it’s not your location, it’s not a user account in a system, it’s not your contacts and it’s not a feature. So, what is identity?” Cox thinks, in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention.
In the future the mobile phone will become a significant player in this field, as well. Not just because we use it all the time but the technology is available and widespread. It would be fantastic to use our mobile phones in everyday life and even in other ways approved by governmental bodies.