Our reputations are running out of control. Multiple versions of us exist in the datasphere, so many that we hardly recognize ourselves. For instance, according to Experian, one of the big three credit reporting agencies, my wife is a man named Alan.
This mistake may be liable to correction, but Experian has never done anything to enlist my aid. In fact, were I to ask to see my file again during the next 12 months, Experian would charge me a fee. So I'm letting the error ride. Given the laughable security of these databases, there's a perverse satisfaction in knowing that much of the information in them is wrong.
Recently, connoisseurs of database folly have enjoyed some major debacles. First, ChoicePoint, an Equifax spinoff that contracts with businesses and the government, admitted that it accidentally gave nearly 150,000 detailed personal dossiers to criminals bent on committing identity theft. Then Bank of America confessed to losing computer tapes with sensitive financial information on more than a million customers, including dozens of US senators.
Hearings were held. Apologies were made. Senators proposed bills of reform. And yet, to this day, information about us continues to propagate through the networks of private companies in a way no regulatory regime appears willing - much less able - to stop. So, as our datasphere doppelgangers go wild, we search for a spell to pacify them, bring them to heel - even eliminate them. We want to reassert control over these phantoms, which we think of as rightfully belonging to us.
But do they? When you look closely, it's hard to find any logic in the idea that our personal data is private property. The very existence of our reputation arises from the fact that information is shared. As we buy and sell, borrow and repay, our identities multiply, accumulating new qualities and scars. This is a good thing. Yes, the promiscuous accessibility of personal information has given rise to a spectacular crime wave, but it has also vastly expanded our networks of trust. Our reputation precedes us, and this is exactly what allows us to form links with strangers without starting from scratch.
Besides, the data on which our reputation is based does not exist in a single file that can be locked away. As Bob Sullivan points out in his book about identity theft, Your Evil Twin, credit reports are created on the fly in response to specific requests. The reporting system reaches into a database of "credit events" and draws out all those linked by social security numbers and similar names. The events are based on reports from countless firms, and "the digital person" - as law professor and privacy expert Daniel Solove calls it in his new book by that name - emerges like a flickering image from a constant stream of data.
Credit bureaus and large commercial data vendors may be at the heart of the recent scandals, but they represent a shrinking fraction of the reputation economy. Tens of millions of eBay transactions rely on extraordinarily effective techniques of reputation management. (One study showed that a good eBay reputation has a value of more than 8 percent of an item's selling price.) Meanwhile, news is filtered by reputation-based systems like Slashdot's, and conclusions about our professional status or competence are influenced by Google's page-rank algorithms. All these systems rely on automated processes that aggregate minor human actions into public judgments that are nearly impossible to appeal.
Why, then, are the credit reporting agencies reviled, while systems like eBay are widely admired? The answer has to do with the architecture in which our digital doubles roam. Commercial data vendors are stubbornly clinging to their early-20th-century origins as card files full of private dope, compiled to keep a local merchant from trusting a deadbeat. In those days, data vendors had no contract or relationship with the people on whom they compiled reports - and they still don't. Credit agencies are hostile to consumers who want to know what's being said about them. Negative information can go unnoticed for years until it suddenly results in punishment from a lender or retailer. There is little chance to challenge bad comments, even if the original report is inaccurate.
On eBay, by contrast, when you get a black mark you immediately know who gave it to you and why. The news that feedback has been posted arrives by email. The design of the system acknowledges that both parties, reporter and reported-upon, share an interest in the data. Although feedback disputes are common, eBay has made itself a transparent broker, rather than a bureau of evil rumors.
This should be tried on a larger scale. Why isn't there a company that offers general care and feeding of our digital selves - a firm that would accept and maintain records of all our transactions and that would analyze and score our behavior, guaranteeing to keep this private until we gave permission for a lender (or anybody else) to learn more about us?
This new type of information broker - and there's no reason there couldn't be several - would have a stake in our reputations and its own. And by making the terrain in which our doubles roam more accessible and more secure from abuse by others, this hypothetical company could empty out the rickety data neighborhoods whose bad design makes them so dangerous.
The change I'm suggesting can be summed up in the old schoolyard taunt: If you're going to say something about me, say it to my face. And I don't mean this as a threat. I mean it as an invitation.
Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com) wrote about Microsoft's open source future in issue 13.02.
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