Google's defacto "identity system"

Scott Lemon discovers that "Google wants MORE of your identity!":

Well FINALLY, Google adds the ability to annotate and more [on Google Maps] through their new My Maps features ... BUT ... I MUST create an account and be tracked by Google in order to use the features!! What the heck? I can't just hack out a quick annotated map for a friend or family without providing information to Google about who I am and having them permanently note my interest in some specific point on earth?

Once again ... the average person has NO idea they are now going to have even more records kept of every place they have marked or annotated, and when they did it. Google continues to gather even more information about you ... who you are ... what you do ... where you do. Amazing.

I know a number of people who are pretty annoyed that they have to use a gmail email account (which they may not even use regularly for email) to access services such as Blogger and Google Groups. I am one of those people!

With the rapid rise of OpenID as a means of individuals integrating their personae across web service providers, I suspect Google's attempt to lock users into Google's own defacto "identity system" could become a real competitive weakness for them at some point.

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. : )

Sxipper, your faithful identity hound

I just signed up for Sxipper, a great little service for Firefox that takes the hassle out of website logins and forms by storing information about your various personas (work, personal, private etc.) for you.

The service is beautifully designed and highly useable—it reminds me of CoComment (for blog comment tracking) in the way it meshes with my existing browser workflows. The semantic training process, where you can teach Sxipper to fill in forms correctly, is deftly handled also. Finally, as an OpenID provider, Sxipper is well placed to help users tap into the nascent OpenID ecosystem.

Well done, Dick—I know you have worked long and hard to get to this point!