Industry is moving with a very rapid pace towards the internet of things, but we cannot have access to internet of everyone without including all of them in it, said Ann Cairns, vice chairman of payments giant Mastercard.
Our real focus should to be on the ways of human involvement in the IoT and that could be achieved through their digital identity, Cairns told CNBC on last Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
In order to create a digital identity of the customers enabling them to use it across the globe, there is a need of developing the sensible and secure way to collect and recombining the data gathered from different sources, she added.
The European Union has described that physical and virtual worlds have been merging because of IoT and that resulted in creation of smart environments.
More and more devices have now been connected with the internet and are even able to communicate with one another, like thermostat in the homes which can be controlled through smartphones while sitting in the office.
Human lives have become more digitized generating an immense amount of data shared online including banking details, shopping orders and medical records, but that has raised the privacy concerns too.
And for these privacy concerns, last year European Union introduced stricter rules through its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect personal information of the people, to abide by all the companies that are operating in EU irrespective of the country of their origin.
The way I’ve described the digital identity required not to move the data from where it is stored with at the moment but to tokenize all the data and in order to combine the whole data for creation of digital identity, that token is to be moved, Cairns added.
And that system of tokenization is really important which will address all the current issues related to the privacy, Cairns described.
