Our Online Selves

• Share This Post
• submit
• 1
• Sparkle (
  0
  )
   

Digital identity is one of the hottest and most complex topics in web tech these days. How do we ensure people are who they purport to be? How do we balance the need for privacy against the benefits that can be gained from authenticating identity? How do we ensure that human rights are protected in a world where online activities are increasingly accessible to online scrutiny?

Rebecca MacKinnon of RConversation discusses these issues in The Future of Your Digital Identity. Last week, she attended the two-day Workshop on User Centric Identity and Commerce hosted by the Berkman Center. She looks at the issue from the perspective of human rights:

Despite my horribly over-committed state I felt this was an important meeting to show up for. I wish they had invited political dissidents from authoritarian countries to provide their perspective on how some technological scenarios would play out in places where free speech is not protected, privacy laws are weak, and where corruption is so serious that criminals can access most user data accessible in-country.

Her lengthy and thorough article provides a useful primer on digital identity, especially for those with a global sensibility. Rebecca wonders whether identity management systems for non-commercial activities are necessary or desirable:

After listening to a lot of discussion and disagreement over two days, I can see why we need better identity management for commercial transactions, but I am utterly unconvinced as to why it's necessary for the web in general.  I can see that there is a serious problem with fraud and trust in the commercial space. I do not see a the same problem in the non-commercial aspects of the internet - or at least, I see problems whose solutions are more social and political, not technical. Having any kind of "identity metasystem" that might link into a Tunisian dissident's anonymous blog (even to that person's chosen "anonymous identity"), or to a college student's del.icio.us bookmarks, or a 15-year old's LiveJournal blog, still strikes me as far too dangerous, with far too many unintended consequences.

Another woman concerned with digital identity is Identity Woman Kaliya Hamlin. After sharing her own work on identity twice last week at the Open Source CMS Summit and at Moose Camp, she wrote up a resource list on digital identity. If you, like me, don't know much about digital identity, you may wish to start with Wikipedia's article. Kaliya includes a link to XmlGrrl Eve Maler's post The long identity tail that covers the identity panel that Eve and Kaliya served on at the Open Source CMS Summit. Eve describes many of the technologies you might come across in the digital identity space like OpenID and LID, two systems that establish identity using URLs.

Lauren Wood of Anyway blogged Learning Identity back in January:

One of the things I've found about trying to figure out identity management concepts and technology is that there are lots of nuances, lots of things to worry about, and it tends to make you more wary (which I guess is all to the good). I now am more careful about whether websites have believable privacy policies before I sign up for them, I have a number of free email accounts for the sole purpose of getting newsletters or registering at websites, and I more often figure the information on these websites is unlikely to be worth the effort.

It's exciting though, being part of something that is important and where people are realising the importance more day by day, sort of like XML in the early days where people starting saying, yes I do have that problem and maybe this technology can help solve it.

Digital identity is one of the most important and exciting subjects in web technology today. But it's not amenable to simple solutions, given the complexity of technical and social questions it brings up.