IDwise blog

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, online identity and privacy issues are rapidly becoming a topic of major interest. This post is a very brief introduction to some of the issues that I will be covering in much more detail in this blog.

Internet identification and authentication

The internet was designed back in the 1960s without  a proper identity layer. As it takes center stage as the global communication platform of choice, this lack is a major enabling factor for identity theft and cyber crime. Therefore, the need to establish reliable and convenient ways of identifying people online and authenticating their identities is recognized as one of the internet’s main challenges. At the same time, the move towards proper identification and authentication is taking the internet yet another step further away from the cybernaut sanctuary it was once perceived to be – see John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace for a radical articulaton of this view. This raises issues of control, privacy and the protection of personal data. ‘Privacy’ here should not be construed in the narrow sense of secrecy (as is the case particularly in US law and jurisprudence), but rather as people’s control over their personal data and its use by others – I will further iterate this point in future posts. Advanced techniques that can help address these issues already exist (e.g. anonymous credentials) and are being further developed. Unfortunately, that does not by itself guarantee that these techniques will become part of the new online identity infrastructure that is now being designed and constructed.

E-government

Meanwhile, governments across the globe are rolling out all sorts of electronic means of identification. E-government is one of the main drivers for this trend, but as government issued eID’s mature private companies are getting more and more interested in using them for their own purposes. This raises dataveillance concerns spanning both the public and private sectors.

Social networking

Another more recent, but equally significant development is the rise of online social networking. In their quest for members (and, ultimately, shareholder value) social networks benefit – at least in the short term – from maximum public exposure of member profiles, also through search engines. As a result, members’ privacy is constantly at peril, as was evidenced only too clearly by Facebook’s recent attempt to have members make their profiles public under the guise of improving privacy. But even if in the future social networking sites do respect their members’ privacy, there will still be a major privacy problem. This is due to the privacy paradoxes inherent in social networking: even though many social networkers may in fact be privacy conscious, disclosing personal data is essential for establishing trust in relationships,  and making personal data public is very conducive to strangers with similar interest meeting each other. How these privacy paradoxes might be solved is one of the big open questions of internet privacy.

This blog

In these pages I will focus on online identity and privacy issues. Often, all these aspects will be combined in a post. At other times, I may focus on a specific privacy or identity topic to make a point. In any case, reader comments are very welcome so as to make this a living and interactive blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 00:01 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.