It's not about your digital identity… it's about your *identifiers*

Death to the cookie! Long live the personal tracker! New 'Decentralised Identifiers' are going to be more useful, more portable and more private than today's customer identity mess

Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.

Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.

If you haven’t yet signed up, why not subscribe:

---

Next Meetup: Barcelona in June

First, a massive thank you to everyone who joined us last Tuesday for the Berlin meetup. We had a fantastic turnout, and it was great to meet so many new people. Also, a huge thanks to Digidentity, who sponsored the drinks.

We’re already looking forward to our next event in Barcelona!

Do join us on 10th June to catch up over a beer, and to chat about all things Empowerment Tech, AI Agents, digital wallets and more.

BARCELONA

• 6.30pm, Tuesday 10th June 2025

• Main bar, Torre Melina, Gran Meliá Hotel, Av. Diagonal, 671, Les Corts, Barcelona (here)

• I’ll be speaking at PhocusWright Europe (get in touch if you want to connect in person)

---

Hi folks,

Too many people end up ‘talking past each other’ when it comes to digital identity, digital wallets and digital credentials. We often use the same words, but mean very different things.

So this week’s post is a deep dive into the biggest elephant in the biggest room.

Because it’s not about your identity.

It’s about your identifiers.

When you look at digital identifiers, rather than digital identity, you see things differently. You see why the digital customer experience is so badly broken. You see that ‘password reset is the new login’. And you see why many of us can get ‘locked out’ online.

And sadly, you can also see why digital surveillance, often accidentally, is everywhere.

Yet we are on the cusp of a digital breakthrough.

Where a new type of digital identifier is about to trigger a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build privacy and security into our everyday digital interactions.

It’s detailed and complicated stuff. But it’s fundamental. And pretty exciting.

This week, we take a closer look at:

• Visible vs. invisible identifiers

• Renting vs. owning your data

• The assignment you didn’t ask for

• Getting back in control

• Towards sustainable relationships

If there was ever a topic about the future of the digital customer relationship, this is it. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.

Grab your nutritious fruit shake, chai latte or frappuccino, and Let’s Go.

---

Customer Futures is mostly about paying attention. To the often quiet, but important developments around being a digital customer.

Making sense of the blizzard of news around digital identity, personal AI, customer engagement and digital wallets. And boy, there are many devils in many details to keep an eye on.

One of the least talked about topics, and yet critical to our day-to-day digital life, is digital identifiers.

Because every company, every business and every government uses different digital identifiers. They all have different ways to track and manage their customers. Different ways to engage with consumers. And different ways to interact with end users.

And of course, each organisation - and very often each business department - uses different formats and standards. All varied, depending on who is involved, doing what, when, and where.

As you can imagine, it’s total digital chaos out there. Or should I say, in there. Because it’s all inside our companies.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Question for you: When was the last time you ‘went online?’

Nope, me neither.

Because digital is now part of everything. It’s no longer the ‘web’ anymore. It’s just life. We’re now connected to digital platforms almost all the time, almost everywhere, and on almost every device.

You see, all our digital interactions need identifiers. So it means we now have trillions of them. They are like stem cells, the root of all digital life. And over the last few decades, they have evolved and multiplied to become the blood supply of our complex digital economy.

You have two types: Visible identifiers and invisible identifiers.

The visible ones are your day-to-day identifiers, the ones you can see. They include your phone number, your account details and all your email addresses. Then there’s your government IDs, your driving license number, and your many usernames and profiles.

On the other hand, your invisible identifiers are tiny, hidden data files. Like cookies in the browser, they are dropped in your digital pocket without you seeing. A set of unsuspecting digital ankle tags that you can’t shake off.

These invisible digital beasties are attached to every device you hold, every browser tab you look at, every app you scroll, and every ‘session’ you start.

Here’s why it matters.

Whoever controls the identifier, controls the data flows.

Whoever controls those data flows, controls the value.

And whoever controls that value, wins.

So the visibility of your digital identifiers matters. Transparency matters. And in today’s 24/7 digital age, control matters.

Renting vs. owning

Why should you care? Let’s go back to the visible ones.

Where almost all of them belong to someone else.

Your phone number? It belongs to the phone company. They can reassign it at any time. And if you move off the network, they will give your number to the next customer.

Your email address? It belongs to your communications provider. Your work email address belongs to your employer, and your personal account belongs to Google, Microsoft or Hotmail. They can reassign, redirect, block or switch you whenever they want.

Not much of an issue, until it is.

Have you ever been locked out of your Googlemail account? These people have, and it’s clearly a painful experience.

Now, what about your social media handle? It too belongs to the social network. You just need to look up #facebookdisabledme to see what happens when Meta decides to block you.

And the most piercing and best example happened a while ago on X (Twitter), when Elon Musk steamrolled the user ‘@x’. Unilaterally taking over the @x handle without warning, without any process, and without compensation to the account holder.

---

---

The assignment you didn’t ask for

Of course, for most of us, these are first-world problems. And we needn’t feel sorry for the rent-seeking leeches who snap up popular social media accounts, hoping that someone will eventually be desperate enough to buy them.

But what if the digital identifier is your business account? Or a pseudonym you use as an outlet for an abusive relationship? Or one you use for political protest in a country that will likely put you in prison?

Now it’s a problem.

And so far, we’re only talking about the visible identifiers. What about the invisible ones? Well, they are not even given to you… they are assigned to you.

And it makes a huge difference.

Invisible identifiers, like web cookies, allow others - and remember, that means businesses - to track you across contexts. To remember where you’ve been, and what you’ve been up to. If we’re generous about it, that means remembering your shopping basket, and improving customer service.

But look closely and you’ll see that identifiers like your ‘DeviceID’ - one of your many unshakable digital ankle tags - are the foundation of the entire digital advertising sector.

It’s how Meta, with your FacebookID, tracks you across online experiences, and builds an ever-more detailed profile to push ads at you. Even if you never signed up to Facebook.

These tiny and invisible identifiers are the entire reason why digital advertising has become the single most valuable business model for the web.

And is why Meta is now worth $816bn.

Yet this very same commercial model has an ugly underbelly. While we’ve been on the joyride towards unlimited riches with digital ads, we’ve sacrificed digital privacy and security on the way.

Precisely because of these same invisible digital identifiers.

As Johnny Ryan reminds us, the global Real Time Bidding (RTB) system is the “largest data breach of all time”.

Getting back in control

But there’s been a quiet but important breakthrough.

It’s one of the main reasons I’m so excited about digital wallets and ‘verifiable credentials’. And why I’m bullish about disruptive new models for customer engagement. Especially with AI Agents.

Because we now have a new type of digital identifier. And one that works for people, not just businesses.

May I present: the Decentralised Identifier (or ‘DID’ for short).

Yes, it’s a new technical thing to learn about and understand. But so was the browser, the address bar and online payments.

And boy are DIDs important. So important in fact, that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the body that looks after the standards for the web, like HTML - thinks so too, and is pretty serious about it.

The last time they looked at digital identifiers? Well, it was 30 years ago… to define the URL.

DIDs are new digital identifiers that are portable and secure. They can change depending on context, and you can have as many as you want and need. No need for one single tracker that follows you around.

But here’s the most important thing: DIDs can be yours.

DIDs give us the opportunity to flip the script, and to (finally) put individuals back in control.

Yes, DIDs are invisible. But you’ll create and control them using your digital wallet and the devices that you trust. It’ll all happen in the background, and only when you need it to.

You’ll be able to change your DIDs when you need, even create new ones for different contact, different accounts, and different contexts. Think of it like being able to use a different phone number for each and every one of the different people and businesses you deal with.

Excitingly, DIDs become a clever way of knowing you’re dealing with the same person or business as before. Like a contact number, but with superpowers.

You see, DIDs are identifiers that can finally work across any context or setting. Whether you’re on a mobile app or on a website. Or if you’re dealing with a contact centre or even face-to-face in a store or branch.

Death to the cookie! Long live the personal tracker!

DIDs have the potential to impact every person, business and connected ‘thing’ on the planet.

I’d go as far as to say that DIDs will be as disruptive to the economy as the internet and mobile phones have been to twentieth-century business models and structures. 

Because businesses won’t just have to rely on cookies to track people. Instead, they’ll be able to use DIDs to contact their customers. And then use those DIDs to build trusted, peer-to-peer connections with each person.

This way, businesses can seamlessly exchange any type of data with customers - even tracking information - when it’s requested and used in a trusted way.

DIDs are about building lasting, private and secure digital relationships with individuals. And as a result, are about reducing costs, increasing compliance and enabling truly personalised products and services… all without being creepy.

But what about those companies that today depend on correlation and tracking, like the data brokers? Well, soon they are going to have to think again about how they create value with customer data.

And the brands that want to build genuine, direct and private digital relationships with customers? They are going to thrive. 

So here’s the prediction: it’ll soon become more valuable to build trusted digital customer relationships with secure and private digital connections using DIDs, than use tracking cookies and digital surveillance infrastructure like today’s ad-tech woowoo. 

I’ll go further:

In 10 year’s time, 80% of the customer data that’s collected today will become relatively useless compared to the data that’s exchanged with individuals using Decentralised Identifiers.

With DIDs, businesses will soon get access to a whole new category of direct, secure, private and permissioned digital relationships. Unlocking new customer experiences, new business models and new levels of customer trust.

Yes, it will soon be AI Agents taking action for us. But those Agents will themselves become much more trusted when we use DIDs to build peer-to-peer relationships. And when we use those same DIDs to secure new verifiable credentials, which can provably only come from you.

Yes, the devil is in the details. And yes, it’s complicated.

But for now, you just need to remember that it's not really about your digital identity.

It's about your digital - and soon to be decentralised - identifiers.

---

That's a wrap! Thanks so much for spending time with Customer Futures.

If you’ve enjoyed it, and want to learn more about the future of Personal AI, digital customer relationships and customer engagement, then why not subscribe: