Private Identifier for Advertising (PIFA)

The following post presents a concept that does not exist today. I wanted to put this new take on identity out in the open to invite discussion, dissection, and criticism. The proposal below puts privacy-conscious users first and could live alongside other ID solutions.

We are in the midst of a tectonic shift around identity in digital advertising. The people making decisions on how we handle identity may only have their capital interests in mind, and the users these decisions impact the most have little say.

I have written the concept as a marketing page that would live on the website of the entity hosting the solution. The entity could be a single company, consortium, or decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), but I made no presumptions. I purposely omitted many details for the sake of approachability, brevity, and clarity.

Summary

The Private Identifier for Advertising (PIFA) empowers users to take control of their online identities. The current state of advertising identity management is fractured, confusing, and opaque. An anonymous identity management system gives users a way to take full control of their digital advertising identity without providing any directly identifying information.