Manage your online identity.

The Pew Internet and American Life project released Part II of its Future of the Internet report. Run by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, the content aggregated in this report is simply worth its weight in gold. In the study, Pew brought together a number of highly respected experts and asked them to respond to some possible scenarios. While the report as a whole is very useful, I felt that section 4 of the report would be of interest to ClaimID users.

Pew posed the following question:

As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly ‘transparent’ globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.

The respondents split, with 46% agreeing and 49% disagreeing. Personally, I’m blown away that half of Pew’s expert panel seems to accept the underlying assumption of the question - that privacy won’t really be an option in 2020. Pew, explaining the current status of surveillance issues, states:

Your life is being recorded in various ways today. Your cell phone is a tracking device. Your personal life and financial status are recorded in various databases. Anyone in the world can find out the tax-assessed value of your home with a 10-second internet search. And, with the further development of “IP on everything,” the concept that people and goods will be tagged and trackable on the network through the use of sensors, things are becoming more complex and more transparent simultaneously.

Billions of radio frequency ID (RFID) tags are already in use due to their growing adoption by retailers (such as Wal-Mart) and government agencies (such as the U.S. Department of Defense). The fairly inexpensive, nearly invisible devices are used as a means to improve efficiency. They can be used to track inventory, equipment and personnel; they may replace bar codes. One estimate finds that corporations making RFID devices will make more than $24 billion a year by 2016.

In a sense, we’re already living in this world. As I type this note, my computer is attached to an internet connection that records my presence; when I present a credit card at the store, I am further recorded - and who knows how many surveillance cameras record my every move. What we lack - what gives us this notion of privacy, is the fact the mesh network that would bring all of this information together doesn’t yet exist (outside of the NSA). How reminiscent of the Facebook feeds fiasco - yes, all my information is out there - but when it is in one place, I am no longer comfortable with it.

In the report, Cory Doctorow and Hal Varian weigh in on a social contract for privacy:

Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow, an EFF Fellow, wrote, “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical. We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows. We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.” And Hal Varian of Google and the UC-Berkeley wrote, “Privacy is a thing of the past. Technologically it is obsolete. However, there will be social norms and legal barriers that will dampen out the worst excesses.”

Barry Wellman explores the nature of power and privacy:

Barry Wellman, a researcher on virtual communities and workplaces and the director of NetLab at the University of Toronto, responded, “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”

A fascinating report. You can download a free copy at the Pew site, and you can view the complete remarks of the experts at this site.

Some very exciting news from our front - ClaimID was featured in the most recent New Scientist, in an article examining online identity and privacy.

What’s more, people can end up having multiple identities online. The picture you present of yourself on the dating site Match.com, for instance, will likely be different to the one you give on Facebook, restricted mainly to universities and high schools. This can be confusing if someone is trying to find out more about you by searching on Google - if they’re thinking of employing you, for example, or dating you. In recognition of this online identity crisis, Stutzman and his colleague Terrell Russell have set up a service called ClaimID (claimid.com) that allows you to track, verify, annotate and prioritise the information that appears about you online, so that when someone searches you they get representative information.

We’re working on finding a print copy of the article and scanning it in. This is obviously pretty exciting for us, to have our work featured in a great place like New Scientist.

I also came across this great picture, from an art installation by the UK artist Banksy. This piece spoke to me on a number of levels.

Lately that’s been feeling more and more true.

A new feature for those of you perhaps more heavily involved in the identity space…

We’ve just rolled out i-names support here at claimID. If you already have an i-name, you can now add it to your account in addition to your other OpenIDs. If you don’t have one, here is a list of registrars.

More i-names information is available at inames.net and iwantmynamenow.com.

Thanks again to JanRain for the libraries that “just work”.

Sometimes I feel like I get online identity, but last week shook me up a little.  Between the Craigslist experiment and Facebook Feeds, I really felt like I saw a scary picture of the future.  What if everything we do, write, action, view and experience is available online?  Is Brin’s “Transparent Society” our future?

If our future is anything near transparent, how can identity solutions assist us?  Will our online existence become our existence of record?  Will our digital and physical personas enmesh so that there is no privacy, so sense of otherness in digital transactions?  And if this is anywhere near the case, how could we dream of managing our identity?

You’ve come to ClaimID for any number of reasons, and we’ve given you a number of solutions.  However, its time for us to listen, to solicit feedback - and you can be as minute or as big picture as you want.  Where is identity going?  What are we going to need to manage our identity over the next 10 or 20 or 30 years?  How has the last week affected your thinking about identity?  What would you like to see in ClaimID that will help you manage this coming identity?

We’re listening, and we’d love to hear from you.

Its the beginning of the semester here at school, so things have been a little quiet on the ClaimID front. That’s ok - we’re learning lots of cool things that we can put to use in ClaimID. Oh yeah, and this little Facebook controversy has been eating up some cycles lately.

I wanted to take this opportunity to point you to something that showed up in my feedreader today. The Naymz folks, Chi-town’s finest, have released a commonsense, fun, and eminently readable guide to managing your identity called “Not Just Your Space: The college student’s guide to managing online reputation.” It’s a 17 page PDF, and it covers some of the very real problems in identity search.

This guide reminded me of the work of husband-and-wife team Dale and Kevin Farhnam, who have written a great guide called Myspace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents. They also blog frequently at Myspacesafetytips.com. With the recent Facebook privacy troubles, it’s good to see people contributing and shaping the dialogue on how to protect one’s identity. This week, we’ve seen millions of students come to grip with the fact their identity is very, very public.

Enjoy these links - and keep your eyes peeled for some cool new features. We haven’t heard too many bug reports about link checking and we hope you’re enjoying your OpenIDs, which you can use to log into Wikitravel (and soon Wikipedia!).

This September 30-October 1, there’s going to be a BarCamp in NYC.  As luck has it, I’ll be up in NYC at that time, presenting a paper.  I won’t be able to attend the entire BarCamp, but I will be around for part of the first day and most of the second.  If you’re in the NYC area, definitely consider signing up to attend BarCampNYC.  This summer’s BarCampRDU was a great success, and I’ve been itching to attend another.  Please join me - but drop a line or a comment, so I can make sure we meet up.