Persona: When an Identity System Doesn't Remember Your Identity

What's the point of a digital identity system if every time I switch platforms I have to prove who I am all over again?

🛤️ My problem starts between two places

My routine is a little unusual.

I live in La Tablada, but I also work in Villars.

That means that during the week I end up moving between two places, two internet connections, two devices, and completely different contexts.

And the trip isn't exactly:

“Cool, I'll grab the laptop and be there in 15 minutes.” 😅

By public transport it can take three or four hours.

By car, roughly an hour and a half.

And since I'm obviously not going to carry a desktop PC back and forth every time I move between locations, I ended up building my workflow around two setups.

🏠 La Tablada
│
├── Main PC
├── Development
├── Administration
└── General work

        ↕️

🚌 / 🚗

        ↕️

🔧 Villars
│
├── Laptop
├── Remote access
├── Development
└── Access to my services

So far, perfect.

That's literally what technology is supposed to help with.

I have my accounts.

I have my services.

I have remote access.

I have synchronization.

I have authentication.

Everything is set up so I can switch devices without having to restart my digital life from scratch.

Except when this shows up:

🔐 “We need to verify your identity”

And that's when the ritual begins.

---

🪪 Persona enters the scene

Many platforms use Persona for identity verification.

And conceptually, the process makes perfect sense.

The platform needs to confirm that I'm a real person and that the identity I'm claiming actually belongs to me.

So:

1. 📸 I scan my ID
2. 🤳 I complete facial verification
3. 🔎 Persona validates the information
4. ✅ My identity is confirmed

Done.

I have absolutely no problem with that.

In fact, I'd rather a platform perform a proper verification than deal later with fake accounts, bots, fraud, or identity theft.

The problem starts when I do exactly the same thing again a few days later.

And then again.

And again.

And again.

---

🔁 Welcome to the infinite loop

My experience ends up looking something like this:

Platform A
    │
    ▼
Persona
    │
    ▼
🪪 National ID
    │
    ▼
🤳 Face
    │
    ▼
✅ Verified

Perfect.

Then I open another platform:

Platform B
    │
    ▼
Persona
    │
    ▼
🪪 NATIONAL ID AGAIN
    │
    ▼
🤳 FACE AGAIN
    │
    ▼
✅ VERIFIED AGAIN

And then:

Platform C
    │
    ▼
Persona
    │
    ▼
🪪 National ID

Me:
ಠ_ಠ

😂

And that's when the obvious question appears:

Didn't we just do this?

---

🤨 Persona already knows Persona verified me

And this is the part that really bugs me.

I'm not talking about completely different verification services.

It's not:

Company A → Persona

Company B → Onfido

Company C → Veriff

In that case, I'd completely understand that each provider has its own infrastructure.

I'm talking about something more like:

Company A ─┐
Company B ─┼──► Persona
Company C ─┤
Company D ─┘

The same provider.

The same document.

The same face.

The same person.

Yet every integration behaves as if this were the first time Persona had ever seen me in its life.

---

💀 And it's not just clicking two buttons

If the whole process were:

“Is this you?”

Yes.

✅ Perfect.

I wouldn't be writing this article.

The process is considerably more of a pain in the ass than that.

You have to:

• 🪪 Find the physical ID
• 📸 Scan it again
• 💡 Find decent lighting
• 🤳 Fit your face inside the oval
• ↔️ Turn your head
• 📷 Repeat the capture if it doesn't like the first one
• ⏳ Wait for analysis
• ✅ Wait for confirmation

And if you happen to be working somewhere else, you get that beautiful moment of:

“Where the hell did I leave my ID?”

😭

All to prove something you've already proven before through the exact same provider.

---

💼 Then I found Persona Wallet

As usual, whenever something technological feels off to me, I did what I probably shouldn't do because it eventually leads to me writing things like this:

I started digging into it. 🧪

And that's where something pretty interesting shows up:

Persona Wallet

Conceptually, it's exactly what I'd expect from a digital identity system.

A kind of wallet where your identity can be linked to credentials that have already been verified.

I love the idea.

Conceptually, something like this:

            Persona Wallet
                  │
        ┌─────────┼─────────┐
        ▼         ▼         ▼
      🪪 ID      🤳 Face    🚗 License
        │         │         │
        └─────────┼─────────┘
                  ▼
           Verified Identity

Perfect.

That makes much more sense.

You upload your credentials.

You prove who you are.

You end up with a verified identity.

And the next platform should be able to say:

“This user already has an identity verified by Persona.”

Right?

Well...

In my experience:

nope. 😂

---

🏝️ Every integration is still an island

After using several platforms that integrate Persona, none of the ones I've encountered gave me something as simple as:

Verify with Persona Wallet

or:

Use existing Persona verification

The process still starts almost entirely from scratch.

So we end up with something pretty absurd.

We have an identity wallet.

We have a verification provider.

We have multiple services using that same provider.

But the pieces don't really behave like an ecosystem.

They feel like islands.

Platform A     Platform B     Platform C
    │              │              │
    ▼              ▼              ▼
 Persona         Persona         Persona
    │              │              │
    ▼              ▼              ▼
 VERIFY          VERIFY          VERIFY
    │              │              │
    ▼              ▼              ▼
   🪪             🪪             🪪

When intuitively I'd expect something more like:

                 Persona
                    │
                    ▼
          Verified Identity
                    │
          ┌─────────┼─────────┐
          ▼         ▼         ▼
      Platform A Platform B Platform C

Obviously, with the user's consent.

And that last part matters a lot.

---

⚠️ I also don't want a global biometric database 💀

I want to make something very clear here, because the lazy solution would be:

“Well, just let Persona store everything and let every company query the same identity.”

And...

no.

Thanks. 😂

That opens a pretty massive Pandora's box around:

• 🔐 Privacy
• 🧬 Biometric data
• 🪪 Personal identification documents
• 🏢 Customer separation
• ⚖️ Regulation
• 📝 Consent
• 🗑️ Data retention and deletion
• 🌎 Different laws depending on the country

I also understand that companies using Persona can have completely different legal requirements.

One platform may need one kind of proof.

Another may need something else.

One may require a recent verification.

Another may need to retain specific evidence for compliance reasons.

And the verification data is probably isolated between different customers or tenants precisely for security and privacy reasons.

All of that is reasonable.

But I think there's a massive difference between:

Sharing my documents between companies

and:

Allowing me to present a previously verified credential.

That second model is much more interesting to me.

---

🪪 The solution shouldn't be sharing my ID

To me, the right model would look more like a digital credential.

Persona verifies me once:

🪪 Document
      +
🤳 Biometrics
      │
      ▼
   Persona
      │
      ▼
✅ Credential

And generates some kind of verifiable proof.

Then a platform asks for:

Platform X:

I need to confirm:

✅ Real person
✅ Verified identity
✅ Above a certain age
✅ Valid document

And I authorize it through Persona:

Share these verification results with Platform X

Done.

The platform doesn't necessarily need another full photograph of my national ID.

It needs to know that a trusted verification authority has already confirmed specific information.

---

🔐 Something like OAuth... but for identity

Conceptually, you could think of the flow as something similar to OAuth.

When an application wants access to GitHub, we don't do this:

Give me your GitHub password

every single time.

GitHub says:

This application is requesting access to specific information.

And I authorize it.

App
 │
 ▼
GitHub
 │
 ▼
Authorize?
 │
 ├── Public repositories
 ├── Profile
 └── Email

      ✅ Allow

Why can't digital identity feel just as simple?

Something like:

Platform
   │
   ▼
Persona
   │
   ▼
This platform wants to verify:

☑️ Identity
☑️ Age requirement
☑️ Valid document

[ Authorize ]

Done.

No need to photograph the piece of plastic in my wallet all over again.

---

🧠 Verify attributes, don't hand over documents

And this is where an idea I like even more appears.

Many platforms probably don't even need to know every single piece of information on my ID.

Let's say a platform only needs to know that I'm over 18.

Why should it necessarily receive:

• Full name
• ID number
• Exact date of birth
• Photograph of the document
• Address
• Other personal information

when all it actually needs to know is:

age >= 18 → true

🤷

A properly designed digital identity system should let us prove attributes.

Not necessarily hand over full documents.

For example:

{
  "identity_verified": true,
  "age_over_18": true,
  "document_valid": true,
  "verification_provider": "Persona"
}

That would be much more elegant.

And from a privacy perspective, potentially much better too.

---

🧩 Identity should be portable

Today we already have plenty of portable technology concepts.

We have:

• 🔑 Passkeys
• 🔐 OAuth
• 🪪 Digital credentials
• 🔏 Certificates
• 🔗 Single Sign-On
• ☁️ Federated accounts
• 🔑 Tokens
• 📱 Wallets

Yet identity verification still has a workflow that looks suspiciously like:

Take another picture of your ID.

There's clearly something we haven't fully solved yet.

---

🎯 Persona shouldn't have to verify me six times

My criticism isn't that Persona verifies identities.

Quite the opposite.

That's literally its job.

My criticism is that, from the user's perspective, the result of that verification seems to have very little portability.

Because if Persona has already verified:

Document → valid ✅
Face → match ✅
Person → verified ✅

then there should be some secure architecture capable of saying:

This identity has already been verified. Do you want to reuse that verification for this platform?

And if that platform legally needs a fresh verification:

Perfect.

Ask me only for what actually needs to be refreshed.

For example:

Previous verification
        │
        ▼
Document still valid ✅
        │
        ▼
New facial check
        │
        ▼
Current identity confirmed ✅

That alone would be massively better than starting completely from zero.

---

🚀 From repetitive KYC to reusable identity

I think the conceptual shift should look like this:

Today

Service
   │
   ▼
Who are you?
   │
   ▼
🪪 Document
   │
   ▼
🤳 Face
   │
   ▼
✅ Done


Another service
   │
   ▼
Who are you?

Me:
(╯°□°)╯︵ 🪪

What I'd expect

Service
   │
   ▼
Persona
   │
   ▼
Previously verified identity
   │
   ▼
Authorize?
   │
   ▼
✅ Done

Much faster.

Much more convenient.

And potentially with less unnecessary exposure of personal information.

---

💡 The ironic part

We have infrastructure capable of recognizing my face.

We have systems capable of analyzing identity documents.

We have fraud detection.

We have biometrics.

We have artificial intelligence.

We have APIs.

We have digital wallets.

We have cryptography.

We have federated authentication.

We have passkeys.

But I still have to get out of my chair because:

“Hang on, I need to find my ID again.”

😂

Something is clearly missing there.

---

🎯 Conclusion

Digital identity shouldn't mean:

digitizing the exact same analog bureaucracy over and over forever.

It should mean that once we've proven specific information, we can reuse that trust in a controlled, secure, and explicitly authorized way.

I don't want every company to have access to my documents.

I don't want a platform to query my identity without permission.

And I definitely don't want some gigantic biometric database accessible to everyone.

I want something much simpler:

I've already verified my identity with Persona. Ask me whether I want to reuse that verification.

One credential.

One consent screen.

One confirmation.

Done. 🔐

Because if every platform using the same provider forces me to start from scratch...

then we didn't build digital identity.

We just turned bureaucracy into a web page. 💀

---

💬 Has this happened to you too?

If you've ever had to verify your identity across several platforms that use the same verification provider:

how many times did you end up photographing the exact same document?

Would you prefer a system where you could temporarily authorize a previously verified identity instead?

Because after repeating this process enough times...

I definitely would. 😂