Way back in the day, all a person needed was a government-issued ID — a piece of paper — to buy and sell and move freely about the land. A person’s world was small. Local. People became familiar with faces and hairstyles and clothing and funny walks.

The more people interacted, the harder it became to pretend to be someone else. The community was an identity safeguard. Human to human contact was an identity safeguard.

Then computers happened. And programs and the Internet and online software and apps. And suddenly, identification became something else: a representation of you, who was still a flesh and blood human being, to a very un-human system made of code and numbers and wires and boards and signals.

When technology increased, human to human interaction decreased. The very nature of identity changed.

Your identity was no longer about your voice or your height or the shape of your nose. It was no longer physical, but digital.

It became your full name, your email address, your phone number, and a formatted password that you came up with and probably used over and over, because creating a new one each time when you needed access to a site would be a nightmare. They call that password fatigue.

So, like a seesaw, suddenly it became harder to prove you were you — and easier to pretend to be someone else.

In the midst of this high-stakes game of who is who, access tokens were born — a new type of way to let you to use Facebook and Twitter and a feast of other online services. These access tokens delivered tons of convenience by giving users the power to enter many sites with just one set of info.

The problem? These tokens could be stolen. And of course, they were — in a huge way — from companies like Facebook. Here’s the statement on what happened in September of last year.

“On Tuesday, we discovered that an attacker exploited a technical vulnerability to steal access tokens that would allow them to log into about 50 million people’s accounts on Facebook,” wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post to his personal Facebook page. “We do not yet know whether these accounts were misused but we are continuing to look into this and will update when we learn more.”

Stolen tokens = 50 million Facebook accounts hacked.

But that’s not the only problem with this type of identity model. Many of these identity providing services are third-party. They’re not always secure, and sometimes they’re one angry employee away from deleting your identity info or releasing it out into the wild.

The key takeaway is this: When someone else can delete your identity or leak it out into the world, you no longer control it.

Metadium is an ecosystem built on a public identity blockchain. The team’s goal is to create a free world through self-sovereign identity. In their own words:

The Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model enables individuals to not only possess sole ownership over their online and offline identities, but also control the sharing and distribution of their personal data.

Under the SSI model, individuals have the power to own, manage and utilize their identity without intermediary.

Metadium users will control the digital destiny of their identities, and we want to help them do it.

Through this exciting new partnership, we’re dreaming up different ways XYO’s location data can add another piece to the Metadium sovereign identity puzzle.

Because it’s about time that both identity — and location — are taken from the hands of careless third parties, and put back in the hands of the people.

Welcome to the family, Metadium!