Bookmarked Now, On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Dog (fpf.org)

Digital identification, integrated to greater or lesser degrees, seems an almost inevitable next step in our digital lives, and overall offers promising opportunities to improve our access and controls over the information already spanning the internet about us. But it is crucial that moving forward, digital ID systems are responsibly designed, implemented, and regulated to ensure the necessary privacy and security standards, as well as prevent the abuse of individuals or the perpetuation of inequities against vulnerable populations. While there are important cautions, digital identity has the potential to transform the way we interact with the world, as our “selves” take on new dimensions and opportunities.

Noah Katz and Brenda Leong provide an introduction to digital identity and where it maybe heading in the future. Connecting with so many different users, identity online is a challenge I face in my work in education. I feel my thoughts on the topic sit somewhere between Dave Eggars discussion of TruYou:

Instead, he put all of it, all of every user’s needs and tools, into one pot and invented TruYou—one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and your one identity—the TruYou, unbendable and unmaskable—was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing and reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One button for the rest of your life online.(The Circle)

And Kim Stanley Robinson’s YourLock:

People began to share the news that you could transfer everything going on in the rest of your internet life into a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy, agreeing to sell your data or not to data-mining operations out there who quickly saw the new lay of the land and began to offer people micro-payments for their data, mainly health information, consumption patterns, and finance. (The Ministry of the Future)

I guess the question is who owns the data?