Reflections on Identity Mashup

I enjoyed being on the panel at the Identity Mashup event at the BT Centre, London the other night. Pursuant is a summary of some of the key points that arose and my further thoughts (mostly towards the end).

Tom Ilube spoke about his company Garlik, which aims to help people track information others hold about them. I find this interesting in that it chimes nicely with my musings on supersurveillance (watching what the watchers are watching about us).

Richard Baker talked about the enterprise in general and BT in particular, and the challenge of providing identity-enabled services to a relatively non tech-savvy mass market. He touched on the strategic model of risk, value and convenience that my friend and white paper co-author John Madelin has developed at BT.

Simon Willison told us about OpenID, a technology protocol that obviates the need to remember lots of passwords (or risk using just one) for all the different web services you use by allowing you to authenticate ("sign in") in one place, then have other web services recognise that you have already signed in, rather than you having to sign in separately for each one. (Wow, that concept is really hard to communicate succinctly without visual examples!)

Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics' Information Systems Group was sceptical about OpenID's accessibility to the masses, expressing concern that technology like the UK government's ID Card will have to be simpler to use than OpenID is if it is to be used at all (there was some disagreement amongst the panel over OpenID's relative ease of use or otherwise—personally, I suspect ongoing innovation will make it progressively even more approachable by non-geeks).

Tony Fish, the discussion moderator, wanted to know where the beef was: where is the value in identity, and who can leverage it? I opined that advertisers found value in being able to build the richest possible picture of a person in order to target adverts at them optimally—which is why Google is making so much money. Conversely, Tom pointed to identity phraudsters who can extract several thousand pounds of value from a target individual (mostly by getting credit) by obtaining just a handful of key data about them.

There were many other interesting points and observations that came up, but there was also a familiar sense in the room of "how the heck does all this fit together in a single, intelligible picture?" I suggested that looking at identity in terms of value could be a way of pulling the many threads together: corporations, government and individuals alike want to realise for themselves the tangible value of identity, and individual people value—to varying degrees according to person and context—privacy, convenience, service personalisation, transparency and pretty much any other attribute of identity-enabled information services you care to name. In other words, we each place particular values on information and the ways it flows or does not flow.

In the summing up, I lobbed a provocative thought into the room: "privacy is dead; long live privacy". Things would be so simple if we didn't try so desperately to hang on to our little sense of bounded self and melted quietly into the identity soup of this webbed world. That is a scary, scary process—but surely an inevitable one, carried as we little people are on the rip tide of C21st cultural evolution?

That said, money is only a particular kind of information, so the massive imbalances of wealth could not be sustained should we collectively allow information to truly flow freely (as in, in an extreme example, the information that allows me to log into my bank account, although of course I am talking about a far broader spectrum of information value here, most of it only indirectly related to cash!).

It's hard to see the rich letting the poor at their lucre willingly (scary!), and indeed the current trend is massively in the other direction, with megabrands (Tesco, Google, Virgin and so on) increasingly acting as massive re-aggregators of value created by others. So we're left with a huge conundrum—information needs to flow freely to create value, but collectively we're not willing to let it do so beyond specific, highly circumscribed contexts. Indeed, if we did so all at once, our whole ecopolitical system would surely collapse.

This all raises many more questions than it provides answers. One thing's for sure: the dual imperatives of information fluidity and information control look set for some spectacular showdowns over the coming years!

After the main session, I got to chat with a number of interesting people. I felt right at home immersed in a crowd of identity nuts! ; )

For another angle on the Identity Mashup event, check out this thoughtful post by Graham Sadd.