According to the latest estimates, we generate around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. That's 2.5 followed by 17 zeros — or rather 2.5 trillion million — a number that's impossible to visualize intuitively, but nonetheless has massive implications for our privacy online, our security and our ability to keep our digital identities within our own personal control. Indeed, recent surveys indicate that as many as 89 percent of consumers believe that corporations currently aren't doing enough to protect their data, while over half of all CEOs and C-suite executives admit that most consumers are right to doubt them on this.
Given the overwhelming scale of this problem, there's little chance it will be resolved overnight. However, as Cointelegraph reported in an analysis last year, a growing number of blockchain-based platforms have emerged with the promise of making the data related to digital ID more manageable. Thanks to the emergence of blockchain technology, a new paradigm — self-sovereign identity — is now possible, one which is shaping up to provide individuals with direct control over the nuggets of data and the credentials that prove who they are. Organizations such as the Sovrin Foundation, Bloom and Civic are all vying to realize this paradigm, while an expanding range of private and public institutions are now planning to build blockchain-based systems of their own.