A person typically carries many items containing personal information with oneself during a normal day. For example, a person often carries a driver's license, payment cards, insurance cards, or other documents that contain information that is private and personal to a holder. In addition, a person often has some amount of personal information that is memorized, such as login usernames, passwords, addresses, telephone numbers, and so forth. In most cases, a person prefers to have close control over distribution of these items and/or the information that comprises these items.
When a person conveys personal information to another, they often have to physically transfer an item (e.g., payment card for swiping at a cash register, etc.) or electronically transfer information from the item (e.g., type in payment card number into web-based form, etc.). These processes may be time consuming, increase the chance of privacy loss of the information, and/or may require the person to organize many disparate pieces of information.
One particular challenge in today's society is having the ability to keep personal information private. For example, a person may not want to physically provide her payment card to another person (e.g., cashier, agent, etc.), but instead may prefer to swipe her card at a customer kiosk to complete a transaction. In another example, a person may choose not to establish an electronic account with an entity (e.g., online retailer) who stores the person's user information (e.g., username, password, address, payment information, etc.) because of a fear of a potential loss of privacy to the entity, a hacker, or a third party.
In some situations, meanwhile, a person may desire to allow others to use his personal information. For example, a parent may desire to allow a child or spouse to make a purchase with the parent's payment card. In such instances, the parent may want to limit any possible exposure of his personal information by maintaining control of the personal information to the extent possible while enabling the child or spouse (or other approved person) to proceed with a use of the parent's personal information.