AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Moving Toward Identity

Despite Mitch Ratcliffe’s kind invitation to stay in the discussion of exchange value and other topics over my head, I’m going to stick with the premise that impresses me most forcefully: that digital identity (and the commercial dimensions of the ’Net that will depend on some sort of online identity, in the face of the ’Net’s tendency to drive all things to the public domain). That is, why would an ordinary citizen want something roughly like a digital identity?

I can think of at least four reasons:

• Jane Public doesn’t have access to her everyday computer; perhaps she’s on the road, or away from work (or home), or perhaps she doesn’t even have a computer pf her own. In a world where we depend on identity that resides in cookies on a core computer, we have to reconstruct the traces of our identity every time we want to work from a different CPU; if we could walk up to a public terminal and log in as Jane Public, with the various identity-markers that adhere to Jane, life would be considerably simpler. Webmail illustrates this argument; I use my email client for daily purposes, but it’s very helpful to be able to access my email via the webmail interface if need be.
• John’s hard drive crashes. Sure, he ought to have backed up regularly, but even if he did, he may not be sure how to recapture his identity data.
• When Joan Public finds it advantageous (to her) to permit limited access to her identity data for marketing purposes, she’ll willingly participate in DigID (think Amazon’s book recommendations on a larger scale).
• Eric Norlin (who is dead right about the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring) points me to a fourth reason, that of identity theft. Of course, the DigID answer would have to be more significantly secure than the dispersed usernames and passwords of our present I>ad hoc arrangements (lest a cracker immediately gain access to all a user’s digitial prerogatives), but especially given the public’s fears about identity theft in the digital realm, this could constitute a persuasive selling-point in efforts toward a standard DigID system. In Eric’s vivid words, “for the most part, the average everyday person will accept it because they will be told how much more secure their transactions will be; how identity theft and fraud is being fought; how parental controls are now easier—stuff that, in Nebraska and Peoria, plays really damn well.”

I’ll say more about this when I blog about reputation, which I hope to do this evening or tomorrow morning, but the cardinal point in all this is that the impetus for widespread acceptance of DigID will come when it feels like using a credit card. That is, no matter how porously insecure physical-world credit card transactions are (and there’s no mistaking their comically insecure character), a credit card feels safe to most users. A credit card resides in my pocket; I can choose to use it or pay with anonymously cash (sometimes—but the ideology of security tends of conceal the exceptions); my credit card has whoop-de-doo security features like a magnetic strip and a laser-etched hologram, a confirmation code printed on the opposite side, and my own signature right on it. These contribute to a sense that somehow physical-world credit cards are secure, but digital identity isn’t. Give Jack Public the feeling that DigID works like a credit card, and you’ll be most of the way home.

On the other hand, if Verisign (“the value of suspicion”), for instance, uses its position as a DigID broker to determine who’s allowed to have a digital identity and who isn’t, to adjudicate which users may have access to whose web pages, and so on—they could rapidly poison the well of DigID goodwill with vivid enactments of every citizen’s fear of Big Brother.

Keep DigID as close to the edges as possible, give the user more control over DigID than she has over her credit card, and watch the ’Net flourish.

Posted by AKMA at December 27, 2002 07:58 AM | TrackBack