Imagine curling up next to a warm fire with the wind whistling outside your home. Imagine that your grandfather enchants you with stories about your ancestors, revealing their heroic acts, failures and the ultimate spirit of your familial epic. In Ireland, that story is identity. Survivorship is not simply a label attributed to someone on their birth certificate. It’s a present, lifelong saga, narrated by our ancestors and told to our descendants. Now, fast forward to 2025. Once more, we’re careening toward a future where digital IDs are dominant. What happens when we try to compress centuries of nuanced, culturally-rich identity into a series of 1s and 0s? Even more troubling, in doing so, are we losing something essential?

Folklore's Echoes In Digital Verification

Let’s take, as a final example, the traditional Irish practice of Tanistry. Inheriting the power wasn’t going to be enough. You needed to show your worth and your character and your fitness to lead — and it was the community’s judgment you were seeking. Now, consider digital identity verification. Every day we earn our name. Can our humanity really be reduced to a series of lines on a page in an algorithm or database? The digital age requires us to rush to judgement with all or nothing certainty – true or false. Human identity is rarely so clear-cut.

The Global Digital Identity Verification Market, as per Coherent Market Insights, is exploding. IDEMIA, Thales Group, Jumio Corporation – these tech behemoths are determining the ways we’ll prove we are who we say we are in the digital space. Are they thinking about the cultural nuances? We would argue possibilities underlying the very idea of identity. Are they even asking the right questions?

Trust's Roots, Tech's Reach

In the Ireland of my youth, in rural communities, your word was your bond. A handshake sealed a deal. Trust was built on reputation, on shared history, on knowing your neighbor’s family for decades. That kind of trust is difficult to earn and is deeply personal. That said, digital identity verification usually involves cold, opaque, centralized processes and systems. We're placing our trust in algorithms and corporations, entities that may be far removed from our local communities and cultural contexts.

This reliance on technology results in a counterintuitive dilemma. In a bid to deploy more security and efficiency, we may be quickly replacing community trust with sand. What occurs when the new digital ID panopticon breaks down? It’s good that these decisions are now reviewable, but where do we go when the algorithm fails? Do we even have a backup?

Forgotten Voices In Digital Age

The greatest peril to these technologies is ironically not the technology itself, but the exclusion it could produce. Not all people have the same access to technology, nor the time and energy to invest in navigating bureaucratic, digitized identity systems. Where does that leave seniors and those with low digital literacy? Or what of those from underrepresented communities, whose real-life identities extend beyond traditional boxes? Are we about to face an exclusionary, two-tiered society? For some people, digital is second nature, for others they cannot find a way to be visible and audible in this new environment.

Identity is much deeper than our immutable characteristics alone. It includes the way we treat ourselves, and it spans our relationships and connections with everyone around us. It’s about our role in the community, our cultural legacy, our distinctive narrative. A technician technocentric approach to digital identity verification will remove our essential human factors. This estrangement leaves us with an incomplete, empty caricature of what it really means to be human.

Alice Mutum, Senior Content Editor at Coherent Market Insights, and other industry experts are undoubtedly focused on market trends and growth opportunities. I challenge them, and all of us, to think deeply about the human cost of accelerating technological change.

So, what's next? Do we want to hastily adopt digital IDs, trading away cultural heritage and community confidence in the name of efficiency? What happens when we partner new technology with classic old values? In taking this path together, we can all help to build a more inclusive and human-centered digital future!

I really do think the answer is in hearing those underserved voices. We can look to the depths of human culture and imagination for inspiration, and understand that identity is more than a set of pixels and attributes. It’s a story only we can tell, a legacy only we can protect. Before you rush to purchase that report with a 25% discount, ask yourself: What kind of future are we building, and who are we leaving behind? Promote digital literacy programs and campaign for the inclusive design of technologies. Call for our digital identity systems to put humanity first at their core. The fate of our cultural identities is at stake.