9 Types of Digital Identity

John Spacey, updated on March 29, 2017

A digital identity is a number, code, record, object or collection of attributes that are used by information technologies to identify entities such as people, organizations, users and customers. The following are common types of identity.

Government

Government identification of people and organizations such as a birth certificate or corporate registration. Government identification is required to access services such as banking that are carefully tracked by governments for purposes such as compliance and taxation.

Organizational

Identification issued by organizations such as a school id or corporate id.

Customer

Identification of customers such as a bank card or a phone number.

User

A registration process that creates an account for a user. In some cases, users may use a pseudonym, nickname or pen name that allows some degree of anonymity.

Transactional

An temporary identity that is established for a single transaction.

Anonymous

An identity that is established specifically to allow a user to remain anonymous.

Networking

Network addresses such as an IP address.

Machine

Machine identifiers such as a serial number.

Attributes

A collection of attributes that together identify an entity. For example, marketing technologies may attempt to identify customers based on attributes such as IP address and phone number.

Overview: Digital Identity
Type	Information Security Authorization Privacy
Definition	A number, code, record, object or collection of attributes that are used by information technologies to identify entities such as people, organizations, users, customers, contributors, actors, equipment, machines and software entities.
Related Concepts	Information Security Authentication Authorization Privacy