The value of our digital identities continues to rise but it’s coming at a hefty price—the data supporting these identities is moving out of our control and falling into the hands of big technology and companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and others. For people like you and me this means we no longer have our digital IDs available for authentication when we need it most.

For those not familiar with digital IDs, they are vastly evolved versions of the IDs we have in stored in our wallets They are built on an expansive set of attributes including our social security number, age, date of birth and biometric data as well as activities that reflect our online behavior. Next they tie in our latest browsing and purchase history, social media accounts and posts, uploaded photos and more. Unlike our tradition identity, the more active we are online, the larger the data set that comprised our digital ID becomes and the more control we give up.

But the tides are changing. Right now, consumers are actively looking to take back control of their online identities and use them for identification and authentication purposes. For example, people will be able to upload and compliment their digital identities with banking and healthcare information.

The good news is they are not going on this journey alone. A growing number of digital identity solutions businesses have arrived to help—According to MarketsandMarkets, the global digital identity solutions market size is projected to grow from $13.7 billion in 2019 to $30.5 billion by 2024. One of these companies I’ve been following is DataSwift.

DataSwift offers personal data servers (PDAs) that let individuals own and control their data. Last year, the company partnered with ShareTrace, a smart digital risk assessment app that provides contact tracing in a privacy-preserving way and offers additional personalized infection risk management tools. As a result, it helps communities, businesses, and cities stay safe by making it easy for people to assess their own risks and prevent the spread of COVID-19 by using state-of-the-art decentralized Personal Data Accounts from Dataswift.