“But with more Americans adapting to a ‘new normal’ in the way we go about purchasing life necessities, this also means more Americans’ personally identifiable information [PII] is at risk of being stolen.”
Two U.S. Senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (I) and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming (R), have introduced bill “S.884 – Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023,” first introduced on March 21st after passing the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The bill appears to have been originally introduced in 2022 by Sinema and Lummis.
The bill’s text says,
The lack of an easy, affordable, reliable, and secure way for organizations, businesses, and government agencies to identify whether an individual is who they claim to be online creates an attack vector that is widely exploited by adversaries in cyberspace and precludes many high-value transactions from being available online.
Incidents of identity theft and identity fraud continue to rise in the United States, where more than 293,000,000 people were impacted by data breaches in 2021.
Since 2017, losses resulting from identity fraud have increased by 333 percent, and, in 2020, those losses totaled $56,000,000,000.
The public and private sectors should collaborate to deliver solutions that promote confidence, privacy, choice, equity, accessibility, and innovation. The private sector drives much of the innovation around digital identity in the United States and has an important role to play in delivering digital identity solutions.
The bipartisan Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity has called for the Federal Government to “create an interagency task force directed to find secure, user-friendly, privacy-centric ways in which agencies can serve as 1 authoritative source to validate identity attributes in the broader identity market. This action would enable Government agencies and the private sector to drive significant risk out of new account openings and other high-risk, high-value online services, and it would help all citizens more easily and securely engage in transactions online.”
Furthermore, the creation of this new task force – which they say the head shall be appointed by the President – will “establish and coordinate a government-wide effort to develop secure methods […] to improve access and enhance security between physical and digital identity credentials, particularly by promoting the development of digital versions of existing physical identity credentials, including driver’s licenses, e-Passports, social security credentials, and birth certificates,” the bill says.
When first introduced in 2022, Sinema said,
We’re supporting innovation and enhancing privacy by improving digital verification to combat identity theft, fraud, and cybercrime…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… – winepressnews.com
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