True. This is the crux of the issue. In the beginning of commerce, identity was literally your physical presence. As business evolved, it gradually became a col

True. This is the crux of the issue. In the beginning of commerce, identity was literally your physical presence. As business evolved, it gradually became a collection of information contained in documents, sometimes bearing seals and signatures. It was a lot easier to copy than someone's physical body, but still not trivial. With the advent of the digital age, it's become trivially easy to copy any data used to identify someone. So we moved to secrets, but that requires two people to keep the secret, only one of whom is really incentivized to do so. Then we turned to public key encryption. It's the best thing we've been able to come up with, but still suffers from computational loopholes, often due to implementation flaws or poorly secured private keys. Does it just come down to the cost of copying? Should all businesses who use identity data indemnify their customers against identity theft (as suggested elsewhere in this thread)?