Identity: personal and personalised information

If we take the subjective experience of identity as being the most practically-useful definition of identity (as readers will know I do on this blog!), then we can say the following of an individual's online projection of their identity:

The online projection of your identity is made up of information that is both personal (about you) and personalised (of interest to you).

Online identity is often equated exclusively with personal information, but that approach proves to be pretty limiting for designing personalised services in the pseudonymous and probabilistic world of the web.

Taking the broader concept of identity, conversely, we can approach the intimately related topics of personalisation and identity management within a self-consistent conceptual framework. And that should make thinking about all this stuff simpler!

Of course, a observer may not be able to tie your personalised information to you as a unique entity in any given instance: for example, Google cannot when you make an anonymous search. However, Google will be able to infer the valuable insight that you belong to a certain demographic or group identity from your search queries and the links you click in the search results (and track you as a defacto persistent individual or group identity via your IP address on your return, of course, unless you know how to hide that information from them).

Furthermore, your personalised information may be far more detailed and rich than your personal information is. After all, it includes not just the huge quantities of information we generate implicitly through our surfing and searching, but also the information we explicitly (co-)create and express—such as this information I am expressing right now, on this blog! (In codifying it into my own words, I am literally "personalising" the information that I have absorbed from others or encountered in my own imagination.)

Your personalised information is not only relevant to your own experience of your identity, then: it is also highly relevant to observers of your online presence who seek to obtain insight into your identity (and then show you just the right adverts, for example). Personalised information allows those observers to build a much more complete, albeit fuzzier, picture of your identity than they could just from your (uniquely-identifying) personal information.

And, of course, should observers be able to tie your personal and personalised information together, they gain oversight of a very complete picture of your identity indeed.