Re: "The ID Divide"

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Mary Shaw [mary.shaw () gmail com]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 2:45 PM
To: David Farber; Bob Frankston
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: "The ID Divide"

This brings us to a question that has been on my mind for a while --

                Why should I have a single "true identity"?

What's wrong with my maintaining multiple personas, either in the real world or the virtual world?  Why can't I be a 
librarian by day and a jazz pianist by night, indeed under different names?  For that matter, whats wrong with several 
people jointly maintaining one persona (e.g. Publius, Bourbaki). Sure, there should be some ground rules, like taking 
appropriate responsibility for whatever commitments I make in each persona. Sure, I should be restricted on a single 
civic identity for voting and government benefits, but why should I, for example, maintain credit and travel only under 
my civic identity?

Corporations are in some respects treated like persons, and those can be created and disbanded if sufficient 
obligations are satisfied (taxes, contracts, ..)

So let me pose this question:  What would be a sufficient set of policies to allow me to create multiple independent 
legal personas? "Independent" could mean "strong enough that an identity thief could only get one of them" or perhaps 
"strong enough that my employer / government / church could not make the connection".

Mary Shaw

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:54 PM, David Farber <dave () farber net<mailto:dave () farber net>> wrote:

________________________________________
From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com<mailto:bob37-2 () bobf frankston com>]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 12:50 PM
To: David Farber; 'ip'
Cc: 'Dan Lynch'
Subject: RE: [IP] Re:     "The ID Divide"

The problem is the word "Identity. For a hospital it is your body. But for social networking sites you don't want to 
give out your one true identity (AKA name/password) – you need to provide proxy authorization or agency. But the rush 
to monetize can't wait for such a sophisticated idea. It's the same as confusing the DNS with trademark (or telecom 
with railroads). But even in the hospitals we're still coming to terms of concepts of agency and informed consent.

In thinking about Spectrum's Singularity site there's a disconnect between the complexity of ambiguous social issues 
and the naiveté in mapping it into technology as if there were just one grand context as per the other meaning of ID – 
Intelligent Design.

It's going to take a generation to sort out the social ambiguities and even longer if we insist on the kind of hill 
climbing algorithms inherent in focusing on short term unenlightened ROI. This is not about greedy corporations as much 
as the degree to which we've removed ambiguity. The cruel irony is that we tend to imbue "science" with the aura of 
certainty when it's just the opposite – science is very conditional. But as we apply math to finance we tend to accept 
arbitrary measures which then fail when the context changes – as they must.



[[snip]]



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