Digital Identity: Who Are We Online?

Valérie Fernandez discusses the issue of our digital identities here. Whether public or private, these identities are formed and transformed at a rapid pace. This rapid evolution raises a myriad of questions—particularly regarding social responsibility and ethics—that affect us all, regardless of whether our digital identities are active or passive.
To address these issues—starting with the question of public acceptance—the Responsible Digital Identity Chair has established a think tank that brings together representatives from regulatory bodies and major corporations.

 

Interview by Isabelle Mauriac

1. A socio-technical transformation of digital identity

As our lives become increasingly digital, a question arises: who are we really in the digital realm? Behind our screens, our online identity—made up of “fragments of identity”—is constantly evolving, keeping pace with the technologies that shape it. In its early days, the internet was a playground for building the “digital self.” In the 1990s, anyone could experiment and reinvent themselves behind a pseudonym or an avatar. At the time, digital identity was a free-form, almost playful experiment. But with the rise of social media in the 2000s, digital identity became a mirror: we expose ourselves there, we compare ourselves to others, and we construct a self-image measured by “likes” and visibility. Then came the algorithmic era. Nowadays, our identity is no longer limited to what we say about ourselves: it is also calculated, inferred, and anticipated. Our clicks, our movements, and our preferences feed into systems that create an invisible profile, which is exploited for economic, informational, and political purposes.

2. A duality between “Gafam-like” and sovereign identities

In this landscape, two forces shape our digital identities. On the one hand, there are the major platforms—Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon—driven by economic imperatives, which organize our usage patterns and collect our data. On the other hand, governments are seeking to ensure reliable and secure identities through various measures, such as France’s biometric ID card and the France Identité app, and soon the European Digital Identity Wallet (often abbreviated as e-Wallet).

3. A fragmentation of identities and trust frameworks

Individuals navigate between multiple identities (as taxpayers, consumers, platform users, and, in effect, both active and passive social actors), which fragments the concept of citizenship and creates tensions between private efficiency and public legitimacy. The coexistence of these identity fragments also raises questions: Who controls our data? For what purposes? And with what degree of transparency? The acceptance of these systems often depends not only on their practical usefulness but also on a lack of understanding of the technologies and their implications. This situation reflects less a consensus than a lack of understanding and visibility, exacerbated by technical and institutional complexity.

Read the full article here on the Télécom-Paris