The Emperor's New Identity Web

Piers Fawkes imagines:

...a possible future where we'd have to manage our identity in a way similar to the way we manage our image today. In the same way we dress and style ourselves to say something (or nothing) about ourselves, we will dress our personal information to do the same thing. Some of will don red coats to show off, some will don black coats to hide.

The basic premise behind this vision is that our privacy is dead. Our data is already out there.

I don't suggest that 2007 will see us trying to don our red coats just yet - for one thing the tools are not built to do this just yet - but I do think that the general public will have a privacy epiphany as they become aware of their lack of privacy and flow of personal data.

I engaged with Piers in the comments section of his post:

Interesting piece, Piers.

I completely agree with you that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying. [weaverluke readers will know that I have written as much on this blog.]

However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) "red coat, black coat" analogy, but don't spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor's New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the "naked identity" of the wearer.

Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.

Posted by: weaverluke | May 20, 2007 1:48:14 PM

Thanks for your great comment, Luke. In response:

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job - you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I'd bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you'll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.

Posted by: Piers Fawkes | May 20, 2007 8:30:52 PM

Piers,

Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.

Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.

Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friends' opinions of other friends and so on.

My takeaway from all this—we must learn deeply about the "Human Web"—how we interact with one another and our world via our intricate and sophisticated, biologically-evolved organism—if we are to understand how to build an effective Identity Web. And privacy is a concept, of relatively recent provenance, which may prove to have relatively shallow roots in that organism.

"Global privacy invaders" awards

Kim Cameron points us to this story:

Privacy International announces global privacy invaders

02/05/2007

In an event in Montreal, Canada, Privacy International ran the first International Big Brothers Awards ceremony. At the 'Computers, Freedom and Privacy' (off-site) conference, with over 200 attendees, PI outed the most invasive companies, projects, officials, and governments. A special award for the 'Lifetime Menace' was also announced.

Background

PI's 'Big Brother Awards' have been running for nearly ten years, with events run in eighteen countries around the world. Government institutions and companies have been named and shamed as privacy invaders in a variety of countries and contexts.

This year was the first time that Privacy International ran an international event to identify the greatest invaders around the world. The event was hosted by 'the pope', as presented by Simon Davies in full regalia [my emphasis!]. Previous hosts include 'Dr. Evil' and 'The Queen of England'.

Nominees and Winners

After reviewing the variety of nominations received from around the world, Privacy International and leading international privacy experts selected the following nominees and winners in the following categories:

Most invasive company

Nominees

• Google, for their retention practices and their purchase of Doubleclick, an on-line marketing and profiling firm
• Choicepoint, for their vast databases of personal data, sold to nearly anyone who wishes to pay
• SWIFT, the international banking co-operative for sharing personal financial transactions with the U.S. government
• Booz Allen Hamilton, the international consultancy, for taking the knowledge and contacts of their senior executives, mostly from U.S. intelligence agencies, to sell and share their experiences with firms and governments around the world

Winner: Choicepoint

Worst Public Official

Nominees

• Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, for his relentless work over ten years to expand the UK into the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations
• Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, for returning the surveillance policies of his nation to the age of the Cold War
• Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and now undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, behind and at the forefront of most disastrous U.S. surveillance policies, most recently the EU-U.S. agreement on Passenger Name Records transfers
• Alberto Gonzales, current Attorney General for the U.S., for pushing expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution in order to create new powers for the Bush Administration without Congressional authorisation and judicial oversight

Winner: Stewart Baker

Most Heinous Government

Nominees

• China, for implementing even greater surveillance policies and continues its oppression of various groups, and moves towards the international stage with the Beijing Olympics with additional surveillance schemes
• The U.S., for leading the world down the path of greater surveillance and its disastrous influence on policy and technology
• The United Kingdom, for being the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations, rivaling only Malaysia, China and Russia as it also leads other countries across the EU down its same path
• Tunisia, for being stupid enough to have invasive and despotic practices even while hosting a UN summit on the information society, and then oppressing guests and groups from around the world while in the public eye
• The European Union, for pretending to be founded upon a bedrock of civil liberties and fundamental rights but then spending decades establishing invasive policies without any democratic oversight

Winner: The United Kingdom (for more information please see Taking Liberties documentary (off-site))

Most Appalling Project or Technology

Nominees

• U.S. Border Policy, and most recently the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, for fingerprinting visitors from around the world while hoisting fingerprinting and ID card programmes upon citizens around the world, including Americans
• International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, for implementing a variety of invasive policies behind closed doors, including the 'biometric passport' and passenger data transfer-deals
• India's Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions for requiring government employees to disclose their menstrual cycles on job appraisal forms
• the CCTV industry, for promoting a technologically 'effective' policy around the world despite all the evidence to the contrary

Winner: The International Civil Aviation Organization

Lifetime Menace Award

Nominees

• The Biometrics Industry, for selling a limited technology to governments and public institutions around the world, promising much while delivering very little except for minimisation of personal privacy
• The Military Industrial Complex, for being behind almost every invasive surveillance policy around the world, where we showed the example of General Dynamics, contractor to a variety of governments, who own companies such as Anteon (UK) who in turn own 'Vericool' (UK) who is responsible for selling surveillance technologies to schools that want to fingerprint their students to verify class registries, library privileges, and cafeteria purchases
• The Intellectual Property Industry, for promoting and pushing invasive policies around the world in order to keep track of the habits of on-line users to pursue their agenda of 'protecting' content
• Communitarianism and the proponents of the 'Common Good', because every bad policy around the world is justified based on the philosophy that is good for society and the individual must sacrifice his or her selfish rights in favour of the needs of the many

Winner: The 'Common Good'

Winners were given the classic BBA award, a golden statue of a boot stamping upon a human head, as promised by George Orwell in 1984 on a vision for the future.

Sounds like it was quite an evening!

Identification (with)

Are the concepts "identify" and "identify with" synonymous?

If I "identify" that a vase of cheery daffodils is in front of me (which it is, as it happens)—I identify the "cheery vase of daffodils" nature of the object. On the face of it, this act wouldn't seem to be the same thing at all as "identifying with" that cheery vase of daffodils—of perceiving a close similarity of myself and the cheery vase of daffodils. I think of myself as many things, but a cheery vase of daffodils is not among them (sadly).

However, if we consider this matter in terms of my mental representation of my world, then it makes perfect sense that to "identify" something is the same as to "identify with" it: the very act of identifying the object entails making a strong connection between my mental representation(s) of a cheery vase of daffodils and what I am seeing in front of me.

In other words, in identifying the cheery vase of daffodils, I am identifying an exogenous perception with an endogenous mental construct. And since that mental construct is my own—literally (if somewhat archaically) "of me"—I can only "identify" something by "identifying with" it.

This might seem like a rather aridly abstract topic, but I feel it cuts to the nub of the human condition. Can you think why?*

*I will blog my answer next week.

Identification, interest and distance

Chris Anderson writes on his blog that "our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us".

I think Chris's observation tacitly encapsulates the deeper meaning of a key aspect of identity, namely "identification": the more interested you are in a subject, the closer you feel to it, and therefore the more you "identify" with it.