Sudo Digital Identities

A secure digital identity for a connected world

A Sudo (pronounced sue-doh) is a digital identity that lets your users interact with other people and organizations while protecting their personal data. Sudos protect your users against hackers, trackers, bad actors, and other pitfalls of life online.

Proxy identities are becoming a critical privacy-preserving strategy as people take back control of their online identity. There is growing interest in the concept of digital identities throughout the enterprise and consumer spaces. We call these digital identities Sudos and they lie at the heart of our Sudo Platform.

The Need for a Digital Identity

Sudos fulfill a clear need in the modern world. We are surrounded by services that collect and aggregate personal data. This data is then used to track users across the myriad of services and sites that they access. By tracking users in this manner, these services can collect enough data points to assemble a full set of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about them.

Such PII can include extremely sensitive information about a user, such as medical history, personal finances, employment status, social relationships, and more. Usually, this is information that the user wants to keep confidential. These services often store this PII indefinitely, putting it at risk of being released in a data breach. Worse, many services monetize the data by selling it on to other companies.

Sudos and Compartmentalization

Each Sudo alters one or more of the identity attributes that make up a user's PII. How much the Sudo differs from a user's identity will depend on the context within which it is used. It may simply provide the user with a different phone number or email address. But it could also provide a different name, credit card number, geolocation, or handle for encrypted messaging and calling.

Users are able to create multiple Sudos. This allows them to compartmentalize their online and offline activities with different identities for each activity like shopping, social networking, dating, selling, and searching. This is a powerful technique for preserving privacy, giving the user complete control over what personal information they reveal to whom. By using multiple Sudos, a user makes it significantly harder for services to aggregate the data and recreate the user's complete PII.

Functional Privacy

Often, preserving privacy means sacrificing utility. But a Sudo gives your user complete control over their online identity without any loss of utility. As an example, if a user is researching a sensitive medical condition they may want to remain anonymous or conceal this from relatives. However, they still want to get the benefits of online tracking. These include the obvious ones, such as preserving their search history and seeing relevant new results, marking favorites, and setting bookmarks. But there are other benefits, like receiving discount coupons, joining currated email subscriptions, or getting referred to a specialist hospital.