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 are much easier to pull off, Amazon’s been doing it for years.  I think this may now be my favorite use case:

“Female CIOs spend 32% more time tracking federated identity transactions through pink-themed monitoring applications.”  — Paul Madson commenting on Wakoopa

The trick with the incidental revealing schemes it getting access to a large flux to eyeball.  Amazon and Google can do that by contemplating their own traffic logs.  Double click does it by negotiating their way into the click stream.  Sites like Delicious, Flickr, and Stylefeeder do it by getting users to reveal their preferences in exchange for helping them manage and share their collections.

Wakoopa provides self monitoring.  It records what applications your using.  Interesting how the intent of that can be framed in three ways: revealing your private data (as above), consumer empowerment (met other users), or as a self control tool.

Which ties this into the Breakdown of Will thread. Tools that help with self monitoring here for example are hardly different than what Wakoopa is doing.  Naturally they accumulate private data.  Naturally they involve the introduction of another party, since that party can enforce the control.