14 August, 2006 - 4:20pm

Is your digital identity your personal intellectual property? Is your Google identity yours or someone elses? Mary Hodder posits these important questions in her Napsterization blog in response to the recent release by AOL of 19 million internet search queries by more than 600,000 of its members. This "Data Valdez" incident as coined by Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the New York Times, brings to light the broader issues surrounding online identity aggregation, privacy, and anonymity.

These are also highlighted in The Wall Street Journal's recent article "New Ways to Prove You Are Who You Say You Are Online", which discusses new technologies that allow people to confirm their identities. This includes the ability to verify age, education, employment history, gender, criminal record, etc... One concern with this that Jamie Lewis, the CEO of the Burton Group, correctly raises is "The minute you aggregate identity information you aggregate risk."

Thus it's now possible to not only get verification on aspects of your identity, but also track what you're doing online (without your consent). We fully support the concept of a digital ID that can be trusted and used anywhere. However, this makes matters of data ownership and user control more pressing, and reinforces the need for a user-centric, Identity 2.0 approach to identity on the web. Sxip's founder and CEO, Dick Hardt described this in his Identity 2.0 blog as:

A goal of Identity 2.0 is to mimic aspects of identity transactions that work well in the physical world. We all have different personas depending on context. I present different aspects of myself depending on whether I am interacting with my mother, my friends, my employees, a server at a restaurant, or my banker. In the online world, we will need the same way to compartmentalize our identity in ways so that we present subsets depending on context. There is no need or desire for a single, global identifier. A logical progression of this is the ability to have a 1:1 relationship, where a given persona is used only at one site, providing anonymity between sites.

Identity 2.0 is coming with technologies like OpenID, Microsoft CardSpace and Project Higgins, which the WSJ interestingly describes as "radical new tools" to address online safety. Join us in the "revolution" and participate in the OpenID code bounty program.