We got so tantalizingly close to overcoming the world’s digital schizophrenia! For a while, the vision of ditching all those dozens of passwords – for banking, shopping, entertainment, news, loyalty schemes, social media sites and more – seemed right in our grasp.

But the global bid for a single digital identity, for each of the 7-billion-plus people on our planet, has been abandoned as being simply too complex.

Scientists, sociologists, and behaviourists, and also security experts from dozens of countries participated. But project leader Dr Ivan Borsky from Moscow University this week announced that the ever-growing complexity of the Internet, and the constant introduction of new digital identity systems, meant the problem was reluctantly deemed insoluble.

“The issue is the chaotic growth of the Internet. It was designed without a system of digital identity in the first place – and then usage just exploded. Now, particularly with the astonishing proliferation of mobile devices, we have a mind-boggling patchwork of non-integrated ID systems, few of which recognize or talk to each other,” he said.

“This ball of string is just too entangled to unravel.”

A number of private companies also laid claim to the holy grail of a single digital identity, but a series of horrendous security breaches scared users back to their multiple passwords.

Ah well. I had hoped I could forget the various Apps and websites I have joined where all my passwords are stored – particularly as I have forgotten the passwords to access most of them anyway! Sometimes I think we’ve made our lives just too complex for our own good…