ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,675,598, issued on July 7, was assigned to Visa International Service Association (San Francisco).

"Privacy-preserving identity data exchange" was invented by Sunpreet Singh Arora (San Francisco), Saikrishna Badrinarayanan (San Francisco), Srinivasan Raghuraman (San Francisco), Kim Wagner (San Francisco), Gaven James Watson (San Francisco), David Henstock (San Francisco) and Jason Lightman (San Francisco).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method is disclosed. The method comprises receiving, by a digital identity computer, a request for personal data associated with a user. The digital identity computer may retrieve encrypted personal data, ...