Digital identity fuels economic upheaval

Article originally published on Fast Company in January 2026.

Every technology shift creates a blind spot. In the early 2000s, companies built networks faster than they could secure them. Today, the same mistake is happening at the human level. People have become the new perimeter, but the systems designed to protect them were never built for the scale, speed, and visibility of modern digital life.

The average person now operates across dozens of platforms, databases, brokers, and identity layers. Wealth, influence, reputation, and safety all move through those layers at the same time. Yet the protection frameworks we use are still modeled on an era where risk lived inside organizations, not around individuals.

The result is a structural mismatch. Attackers understand people as a system. Most defense strategies still treat them as isolated endpoints.

This is why the next evolution in cybersecurity will not come from bigger firewalls or deeper threat feeds. It will come from governance. Specifically, a new way to understand how personal data behaves across an ecosystem that moves faster than any enterprise policy.

I call this approach Identity Risk Governance. It is a model built around a simple observation. The human attack surface is not linear. It is compounding. A leaked address becomes a SIM swap, where your mobile carrier is tricked into transferring your phone number to a new SIM card identity that a thief controls, giving him access to your texts, calls, and crucial two-factor authentication codes. A forgotten social media profile becomes an impersonation vector. A single exposed identifier multiplies across brokers. The threat is not the event, but the chain reaction.

When you map that chain, three patterns appear.

1. Exposure

People leave traces everywhere. Addresses, phone numbers, relatives, domains, past accounts, metadata, cached posts, and archived bios. These traces circulate through brokers and aggregators that regenerate information even after removal. Without a governance system, the footprint grows on its own.

2. Inference

Attackers do not need a full profile. They only need enough pieces to guess the rest. Public posts, travel patterns, registries, purchase records, announcements, and social graphs build predictable windows into a person’s life.

3. Amplification

When an exposure is exploited, the fallout spreads beyond the individual. Businesses, creators, investors, families, and even local economies absorb the damage. Identity has become financial infrastructure. When it breaks, revenue breaks with it.

Identity fraud has larger risks

Two engines of the American economy—the creator ecosystem and rising wealth concentration—are vulnerable to identity theft. Today, when identity is compromised, the impact is felt beyond individuals.

That amplification is why this matters: The creator economy and concentrated private wealth are built on personal identity as an economic asset. When a creator or wealthy principal suffers identity theft, the consequences hit far beyond that person—they affect platforms, advertisers, payment processors, and local revenue streams.

The creator ecosystem (think YouTubers, influencers and podcasters) is now valued at more than $250 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts that number will rise to $480 billion by 2027. In 2024, OnlyFans alone generated $7.2 billion in gross revenue. These platforms depend on creators to drive commerce, advertising, and cultural momentum.

However, when a creator suffers a leak or account compromise, the financial loss touches subscription platforms, processors, marketing budgets, and taxable revenue. The risk is not abstract. It is measurable.

On the other side of the spectrum, wealth concentration is rising. Ultra-high-net-worth individuals now manage trillions in movable assets across banking, fintech, real estate, venture, and digital accounts. Identity fraud cost Americans more than $12.5 billion in 2024. Much of that loss stems from personal exposure, not enterprise breaches.

The common denominator is simple: People have become the entry point for economic disruption.

How an identity governance model works

Identity Risk Governance treats identity not as a credential but as an evolving organism. It forces leaders to examine how data moves, where it leaks, how it regenerates, and what second-order impacts follow when that data is misused. The model focuses on four actions.

1. Mapping exposure. Understanding where a person exists digitally and how those layers connect.

2. Stabilizing the footprint. Reducing surface area across brokers, archives, and redundant data stores.

3. Monitoring drift. Tracking how identity spreads over time, especially through automated feeds that recreate old data.

4. Responding through context. When a breach occurs, management must account for both the technical event and the reputational trajectory that follows.

These functions form the foundation of the LeyesX identity governance model I’ve developed. The goal is to create a predictable environment where identity is stable enough to support business, creativity, investment, and influence without being compromised by the speed of the internet.

Identity risk is about to define the next phase of cybersecurity. Not because it replaces existing systems, but because it connects them. The network model secured machines. The governance model will secure people.

When identity becomes the attack surface, governance becomes the defense.

Final thoughts

This transition is already happening quietly. Creators are adopting these principles to protect income streams. Family offices are testing human-centric risk controls. New boutique firms are building operational models around footprint reduction and narrative stability.

The shift will accelerate because the costs of identity theft will force it. Exposure has become expensive. Stability has become strategic.

The companies and individuals who treat identity governance as an operational requirement, not an optional safeguard, will be the ones who scale fastest and withstand disruption.

Digital identity is no longer personal. It is structural. And the organizations that realize that will shape the next decade of security design.