Open Thread - What is the future of online identity?
September 12th, 2006 - Fred StutzmanSometimes 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.
September 12th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
We need multiple identity personas, the strongest security for our identity management and strong, personal privacy laws. But most of all, we need education. My personas can be as transparent or opaque as I chose but if I don’t understand how to manage them, what’s the point. Personas must be capable of being verified and verifiably owned by a certain individual but not required to be.
As for the craigslist issue, I’ll say what I was modded down for on digg for saying. The only thing wrong with what happened was that people were ignorant enough to submit personal information to an unknown, anonymous individual. It was hurtful. The guy was a dick for doing it but the people were just as stupid as much as he was a dick. This was not an identity issue. It was education. No matter how successfully implemented or capable our identity management becomes, people will still be too ignorant to manage their own identity or willing to ignore secure measure for greed/gain. In this case, the greed of easy sex. This was a risk/reward issue. They were willing to risk their identity for what, to them, must have been great reward. It’s why 419 scams still work. No amount of technology or law is going to stop people from falling for this. Live and learn. I’ll bet 100% of these people will be much more concerned with their identity in the future. If they learned about such scams before it happened, they may not have fallen for it. Either way, it’s education.