Identity is at the core of everything that we understand about ourselves. And ultimately, it’s what makes us human.

In today’s digital age, our identity is even more than that. It’s essential to accessing our accounts and personal data. It’s everything that we own, do, and share. Our digital identity is how we present ourselves to the world and how we interact with it, so it’s important that each of us has control over our own.

But in its current state, identity is severely broken.

Today, we’re constantly verifying our identities on every platform we use. And with each new account, we forfeit information about ourselves to whomever or whatever manages that user data. We use bits and pieces of information to prove we are who we say we are. All those bits and pieces add up — after years of living our lives online, there’s a lot of information about each and every one of us out there on centralized databases across the World Wide Web.

Whatever data we’ve traded for access to any given platform is entrusted to the platform owner, leaving it subject to their cybersecurity efforts. No matter how well they protect that data, there’s still the ever-looming threat of a data hack, which would spill our sensitive identification information out onto the Internet, forever out of our control and available for anyone to misuse.

And those hacks aren’t just hypothetical possibilities: in the past 15 years, more than 2.6 billion people have had their data hacked when major centralized databases were compromised. Most recently, 500 million people have had their identity information stolen from a Starwood/Marriott hack, so it’s only getting worse.

Thankfully though, the problems with identity are fixable. And Civic is here to fix them. The best way to protect people from these hacks is to make stolen data useless.

Civic’s core vision is to give users autonomy over their digital identity.

Our blockchain solution empowers people to take back control over their data by offering a secure alternative to the common username-password combination. Instead of entering their information with every login, users just need to verify their identities one time. That data is stored on that user’s mobile device rather than in a database, keeping it out of hacker hands. Best of all, users choose who has access to their digital identity and when.

Now, with the blockchain and decentralization, we’re moving into the future of secure digital identities. By decentralizing this sensitive information, we can be sure that each user maintains full control over their own digital identity. Our identities belong to us, and no third-party can tell us otherwise. After all, identity is a human right.