Recently I've been thinking in more detail about the nature of online identities and the impact they will have on our lives in the years to come. The increasing ease with which one can search through such identity information and the amount of information readily available or easily deduced means that it is an issue that both individuals and organisations will have to deal with. Here I would like to briefly look at exactly what is an online identity and what opportunities and challenges are related to the existence of such an identity.
What is an online identity
A quick search on Google on "online identity" gives as a first result a Wikipedia page that offers a relatively sensible definition of what is an online identity. It is the social identity we create through participation in social networks, discussion forums, through the sharing of our photos, the posting of comments on blogs and other websites, etc.
The actions that lead to the creation of such an identity may be performed anonymously or may be attributed to a particular name (either a fictitious one or our actual name) making the resulting information more or less easily traceable back to our actual "real life" identity.
The majority of the other results from that same search lead either to online articles that warn of the challenges of managing online identities or to services that claim to allow us to manage, claim, or discover more about our identity.
These results provide a good indication of what are the principal issues related to the existence of an online identity. As more of our life either directly takes place online or leaves a digital trail it is inevitable that the management of this trail will be one of the key challenges for people wanting to make full use of the interaction opportunities offered by the web.
There is a tension to manage between wanting to gain the most through our participation online, hence offering up more information about our actions and relationships, and also wanting to control and protect our online identity.
The challenges of online identity management
These tensions between disclosure and the need to control and protect identity raise a number of issues - what I consider the challenges of identity management.
Owning your Idenity
To begin with there is the fundamental issue (almost a basic instinct) of ownership. What we say, do, take photos of belongs to us - while we want to be able to share and allow the people we share it with use it to some extend but we also want to be able to control it.
Protecting your identity
We clearly don't want unauthorised access to our identity information. We must protect both against people completely taking over our online identity (with all the related consequences) but also against people being able to piece together enough pieces of the trail we leave that they are able to deduce new information which we did not want to explicitly make available.
Managing your identity
In reality we have many different identities depending on the context we are in (e.g. family, friends, work) - we need to manage the image of ourselves in each of these contexts and also carefully guard the borders between the different identities. We may also want to employ tools that will enable us to enhance or refine our identity based on our own personal goals and aspirations.
Searching and analysing your identity
A result of having identity information in digital form means that we can also perform searches through this information and analysis on our identity - this challenge will become particularly relevant as we begin to amass decades of identity information. One can imagine a scenario where we sit down in front of a computer with a psychologist and search through our identity information to pinpoint changes in our behaviour pattern that may explain our current condition.
The future of online identity management
We are still very much at the beginning of a long road that may lead to solutions for the challenges listed. There are few tools at our disposal currently to manage the identity information of an individual or an organisation and our ability to control our information is very limited.
For example , when we join a social network we currently sign an all or nothing contract where we essentially release the owners of the network of almost all responsibility and allow them to do pretty much anything they deem appropriate with our information. However, this cannot be the situation indefinitely. There is no reason why one should not negotiate a contract with a service that meets both the user's and the network's demands. Different users may enter into an online community and make use of the services under different conditions.
To achieve this we need to develop the tools that will enable us to reach such agreements with a reasonable investment of resources. Clearly we cannot employ a lawyer to simply sign up to a website. We require automated managers and guardians of our online identities that can negotiate and monitor access to our identity information from services such as social networks that act as aggregators of identity information. Services will need to be able to provide a clear trace and justification of how our information is being used.
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