We have hundreds of different types of accounts. Some of us might even have thousands. Some are for email, others for various forms of finance, shopping, food, fitness, work, education, government, countless forms of identity, and so on. For some of us, our lives are managed through our countless accounts. And most of these accounts are now digital. The challenge is that often we don’t know which account to search for what and there is no way to search across all accounts at once.

One of the promises of the digital wallet is the solving of these challenges. One wallet (or multiple if you prefer) that is controlled by you containing all your accounts and information. The idea of the wallet is to provide greater control or data portability to the person. However, it doesn’t mean the organisation who needs or wants the data to provide their service or product doesn’t have access, it’s just that who controls the access that changes.

Whether or not digital wallets will fulfill their promises is yet to be seen. It is likely they will fulfill some and not others, but along the way we will learn much. They may help us on the journey of figuring out how to enable the data subject to be more involved in the decision making process of how their data is used.

Let’s see.

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