Operators: We make GSMA Open Gateway easy, fast and profitable - want to know more..?

P

E

Connecting Humans – Gautam Hazari

How the SIM connects humans, not IP addresses.

Humanity has not seen few better inventions than the Internet – redefining connectivity, connecting everyone and everything and every thought. 

Let’s face it – the Internet was never designed to identify humans, it was designed to identify computers, hence there are IP addresses, not John, or Susan or Gautam.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, humans do not have IP addresses. The Internet had no Identity layer, and it still does not have an Identity layer. 

In the initial days of the Internet or rather the web, we connected the web servers and the computers browsing the web to the Internet – and not identifying the human user was not that important, as we mostly consumed content, but soon we started to do commerce in the Internet – and then it most certainly did matter who was the human user. 

The internet was never designed to do this, and we then created a zero-trust model – where the services challenged the human user to prove who they are – using passwords, OTPs and biometrics. 

It was largely ignored that a parallel connectivity invention was commonplace in 1991 which did not challenge the human user to prove who they were. This was the Mobile Network, which used the SIM to identify the human user. The “I” in SIM stands for “Identity”. 

Let’s embrace the power of this to connect everything and, yes, to identify the human user, securely and conveniently.


Gautam Hazari is Sekura’s Chief Technology Officer and a Mobile Identity guru. He and his team have built the Sekura API Framework (SAFr) – a unique platform that connects in real-time to mobile operators to allow enterprises to build trust in their customers, prevent fraud and create awesome logins.