The Trust Crisis
How Big Tech Stole Your Identity—and the New Model That Takes It Back
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
The digital world runs on trust—and trust is failing.
The Trust Crisis exposes why identity theft, data breaches, and privacy erosion have become unavoidable and normalized features of human interaction with the digital ecosystem. The problem is not careless users, but helpless users. It is a rigged and broken identity verification system that forces people to repeatedly give up sensitive data with zero assurance to protect them.
Raj Ananthanpillai reveals how today’s flawed verification model creates massive security risks and explains why adding more safeguards or regulations has not fixed the issue. He introduces a new framework for digital trust—one that replaces endless data sharing with reusable, consumer-owned trust credentials.
Readers will discover:
• Why current organizational data storage approach puts everyone at risk
• How identity verification and screening can work without exposing personal data
• What a Trust Credential for Life looks like in practice
• How consumers and organizations can restore digital trust with a new verification model
Clear, timely, and solution-oriented, this book is essential reading for anyone concerned about privacy, security, and the future of human identity screening in an AI driven digital world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this pointed debut call for better personal data security, Ananthanpillai (Implementing Global Networked Systems Management), CEO of the identity screening company Trua, reveals dire flaws in the way sensitive information is handled. Credit card and social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, and even fingerprints, he explains, are stored by lenders, landlords, employers, governments, and e-commerce sites in hundreds of databases where they can be sold or stolen. Identity theft can saddle people with fraudulent loans, ruin credit scores, and impact job prospects. The cure, Ananthanpillai contends, is a "Trust Credential," a smartphone app that stores data and selectively conveys it to whomever one wishes, with the information verified by a Trust Bureau. The system, Ananthanpillai explains, works like a credit card that approves payments without divulging bank account information to the merchant. The details are somewhat murky—there are blockchains involved, and procedures to prove to an AI that one isn't an AI—and the book is basically a pitch for Trua's own Trust Credential and Trust Bureau systems. Still, Ananthanpillai's critique of the current slapdash data systems model is trenchant, and he makes a persuasive case for a useful tech innovation.
