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Category Archives: identity

Get 40% more done, keep it secret

Wow!  This a wonderfully counter intuitive bit of social science!
Imagine that you would like to be sword swallower.  In service of achieving that goal  you set out to accumulate assorted accouterments: a sword, some books on sword swallowing, you study your vocabulary, you watch some videos, you take a course.  Each of these moves you [...]

Presentation of Self

Below are a few screen shots I found thought provoking.
The first is taken from a site that is somewhat analogous to Twitter, Friend Feed.  Actually like a lot of sites they recently started chasing Twitter’s tail lights.   It has a lot more features.   Like Twitter you have a timeline or feed of items about your life and [...]

Tracking the powerless

Here’s another example of the natural progression of Moore’s law and privacy invading systems; where in the powerless (shipping containers, pets, cattle, prisoners, solders, women and children, shoppers, etc) pay the start up costs.  In this case we are tracking high school students.  I think I may need to touch up my model a bit.  [...]

Unhelpful

Lauren Weinstein posts about being accused of being unhelpful.
But a message from another privacy personality was as polite as it was disturbing.
The sender noted pretty much essential agreement with my arguments regarding the lawsuit, but strongly asserted that my post was “most unhelpful” by “undermining” efforts to bring Google into advocacy group consultations.
Solidarity has it’s [...]

Pink-themed Monitoring

Managing the selective revealing of fine grain private information marks one border in the Fantasy land of Internet identity design.  My preferred use case: Authorizing your barber to reveal your hair color to your bespoke tailor.  Far on the other end of the imaginary continent are systems that distill statistics from the incidental revealing.  Those [...]

Account Linking

Many many years ago now I spent a while working on the Internet Identity management problem.  In fact I have a whole category with postings I did during that period.  Boy, talk about a tough problem!
Back in day one of the problems we worried about a lot went under the name “account linking.”  This problem [...]

Identity Hub Shutdown

Unsurprisingly all the driver’s licenses in the US, which are nominally issued by the states, are actually coordinated through a centralized hub.  We know because it broke.  I love puzzling out where these hubs are.  For example there is another one for medical information, that I gather is here in Boston.
I’d be very interested to [...]

Digital Footprints

The Pew center has printed up a 50 page report on their survey results regarding online privacy and how people perceive and act upon the issue.
It’s always fun to see the category names that get manufactured for these kinds of reports.  They have four:

Concerned and Careful
Worried by the Wayside
Confident Creatives
Unfazed and Inactive

I wonder what the [...]

Taming Gorrillas

My thoughts keep turning to this effort by the publishers to update the robot exclusion protocol, i.e. ACAP. The current situation with the robot exclusion protocol certainly doesn’t look stable. We are going to get a revision, or substitute to that protocol. But who has the market power, the legitimacy, the [...]

The Wrong Default

End to end encryption should be the default, but it’s not.  So, I find it interesting to look for the drivers that might change that.  What will create strong enough demand that it will become unacceptable to ever allow any data to move thru public networks in the clear?
Fear of identity theft is one such [...]