Who are you? Your Wikipedia entry or your last blog entry? What about that half-clothed avatar or raunchy kid from a few years back?
The panel "Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online" reminds us -- not that we needed it -- that our identity lives on and it's mutating out of control. Friends, enemies, and crazy exes (aka Sibils) augment it, and big companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, use and benefit from it. Where's the user control?
Early on in the hour-long panel, Ted Nadeau, from Dot Line Inc.,
reminds us that though we're all pro privacy, there really is noprivacy online.
Take a look at the top handful of sites trying to offer userscontrol over their online identity -- be that one or 12 personas -- andexpect to be disappointed. "Reputation 1.0 isn't working -- there's noconsistency in someone's reputation," says Nadeau. "There's bigthinking, but no one coding yet."
What's the perfect reputation system? Perhaps, says Nadeau, one inwhich you can move your persona from one web site to another, withdifferent data stores and key spaces (say, your copy, that of othersand a shared version).
This is pretty much what panelist Kaliya Hamlin, a freelanceevangelist for open standards in user-centric identity (OpenID2,
i-names, XRI/XDI, SAML, icards, Higgins), backs. With OpenID2, shesays, you travel the web with your identity. Essentially, you own it,
and there's no breadcrumb trail for online companies to feed off.
Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble, a social search site, goes on toask, Why shouldn't users own all their clicks? Hodder put this questionto companies like Amazon and Google -- and (amazingly) they agreed.
She's even got a tool to track a person's online life via clicks.
This idea of leave no trail behind is big. Eliot Van Buskirk's article about the RIAA's latest poison pen shows us why users might want to own a copy of all their online wanderings and actions.
Another option (I think from Hodder and Hamlin): If all our info is public, but anonymous, that's even better.
One last nugget from Hodder: We're agreeing to things we don'tunderstand. Consider Google's deal with San Francisco to set up thecity with a wireless network. Taxpayers are giving up their "attentiondata" -- their online entities -- for 17 years. Hodder says that'sworth millions, far more than the cost of the wireless setup. Shouldn'tthe city or someone get a cut?
(image from sxsw)
