Sphereless

What is it to be "the public" in a digital world? Scribe at Sphereless has some intriguing thoughts*.

*Hint: you have to read these posts a little slower than your standard blog fodder, as Scribe don't waste no words.

Privacy is dead. Long live privacy!

Sam Sethi muses about using OpenID and XFN (XHTML Friends Network) for a distributed "trustlist" (aka whitelist) network.

In this respect and many others, OpenID looks set to empower us to distribute and re-aggregate our presence in ways barely imaginable in a siloed authentication world. This seems like a wonderful prospect to me.

But traditional privacy buffs beware: the single identifier of your OpenID may well make collusion between service providers to share your personal info far easier than it is in our current identity-fragmented web!

Is this really a problem? I used to believe that it definitely is, but seems to me that maybe it doesn't have to be: if we can devise effective distributed reputation systems, then people will be incentivised to disclose and re-contextualise information about others in a respectful way. And it will be the big organisations with the best opportunity and the most to gain from illicit information-sharing collusion with one another—corporations and government—who also have the most to lose in the "reputation web". After all, corporate identities are not disposable, by definition.

In this light, perhaps we could just after all be entering a new era of mutually-respectful information transparency, where each individual's integrity is honoured above all else? Well, it's nice to dream. : )