How Identity Technology Has Evolved For Our Security
We certainly have come a long way since the days when the handwritten signature was the major form of identification, once used synonymously for legal documents, bank checks, or anything at all that required it in daily life.
These days, with a far more complex society and advanced technologies to deal with, the different forms of identification ranging from digital signatures to passwords, the various biometric methods, and more. Here we explore the evolution of identity technology over the past decades, and what it might soon become.
The Online Era
For the past two decades, as online technology has rapidly improved, so has a paralleled need for online security. Methods of identification quickly went from simple passwords and steadily became ever-more rigorous and complex.
Passwords became longer and began requiring the use of numbers, then lower and uppercase, then symbols, and so on. Next thing we all blinked, and suddenly most of us have multiple accounts with multiple different lengthy passwords to remember. Writing them down in a little book is helpful, or we simply just forget, and must go through that pesky “forgot your password?” process again and again.
Luckily though, some new methods of identification were also being developed and released, the most effective of which has now come to be called biometrics.
The Age Of Innovation
The pasts decades have truly been an amazing era for technology and innovation. Mobile technology has helped somewhat by introducing the One Time Pin and two-step verification. However, it’s the advancement of biometrics that has generally showed the greatest potential.
Finger-print readers and eye-scanners, as we know from the movies, have been around for quite some time. However, they were always far too expensive for average business, let alone everyday person, to afford. That is until the 2000’s, when scientists began to make truly huge strides in miniaturisation at lesser cost, which also ushered in the birth of mobile technology with new advanced biometrics.
As the 2020s rolled in, and the pandemic practically forced the world into an almost fully digital way of life. With everyone already suffering from password overload and OTP anxiety, it’s clear that something needed to be done.
The Dawn Of ‘Passwordless’ Identification
In September 2021, Microsoft announced its plan to begin rolling out a new ‘passwordless’ authentication system. The new system comes in form of an ‘authenticator app’. This app can be downloaded to both your PC and mobile device where you can also easily claim an online casino welcome bonus, and completely replaces the old sign-in method.
Instead, the app uses two-step verification. If you want, you can include a password as well. Otherwise, you have a choice of your device’s biometric security, such as fingerprint or face-recognition, OPTs, and QR code generation for other accounts that support the app.
Microsoft has since warned though, that this is still new, and the app won’t work for their older technology, and for non-Microsoft vendors and sites that don’t use a similar system. Not great, but it’s a start. The tech industry is showing a steady trend in this direction and hopefully, very soon, passwords will become a thing of the past.