CDR: Reputation, Identity, and Belief

[Tim May]

At 12:31 PM -0400 10/18/00, David Honig wrote:
>  >> Other choices?
>>>
>>>     Identity Theft
>>>     Identity Pollution
>>>     Identity Vandalism
>>>     Identity Assault
>>>     Identity Misappropriation
>>>     (Slander in the First Person :)
>>>
>>>  Would it matter if we substitute "reputation" for "identity". 
>
>I think it'd be clearer.
>
>>>Is my identity
>>>  (to others) any different than the reputation with which it is associated?
>
>No.
>
>I suggest Reputation Hijacking, but don't expect the lexicon to change.


And I think all of these examples/phrases miss the essential point.

(I don't intend for this to sound too confrontational, though it is 
phrased bluntly. This is in fact an extremely interesting topic, and 
I thank David for making his points so that I can rebut them.)

Here are the bold, but little-appreciated, points:

Alice does not own her reputation.

Alice does not own her identity.

Alice does not own the trust others have in her various credentials.

Alice does not own the various beliefs people and agents around her 
have. Even when those beliefs involve _her_, e.g., her identity, her 
age, her creditworthiness, her insurability, and her "reputation."

The key issue is an ontological one.

These are all beliefs that various others have in some attribute or 
credential referring to Alice. Bob believes Alice to be a trustworthy 
person. Charles believes Alice to be 25 years old. Dorenda believes 
Alice to actually be the person with the birthname "Alice B. Toklas." 
And so on.

Sometimes other people act to change these beliefs. Hilda the 
Hijacker says "Do you know that Alice was actually born Ruthanne 
Rutledge?"

Or Lenny the Lender says "Alice borrowed money from me and didn't pay 
it back. Watch out for her."

Has Hilda the Hijacker actually "hijacked" Alice's name identity? Has 
Lenny the Lender stolen Alice's creditworthiness?

Crypto and related tools offer Alice and others the means to make 
such casual "thefts" (aspersions, etc.) harder to do. Alice can 
digitally sign to "prove" mathematically she is the  holder of 
certain credentials. And so on, for the obvious extensions to webs of 
trust, webs of doubt, webs of gossip, etc.

Any talk of "theft" or "misappropriation" misses this key point.

And, even more importantly than the crypto/signature part 
(ironically), such language misses the critical issue of "who owns a 
reputation?" As I have described above, Alice does not own her 
reputation: "her" reputation consists of a set of beliefs of varying 
degrees of certainty held by a set of people around her.

"Where do I go to get my reputation back?" Think about it.

The same point applies to identity, of course.


--Tim May
-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon"             | black markets, collapse of governments.