Identity is Hard, Let's go Shopping

coderman coderman at gmail.com
Sat Mar 4 08:35:55 PST 2006


http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/2006/03/identity_is_hard_lets_go.html

"""
(Posted by adam)
Kim Cameron... says: "In my view, the identity problem is one of the
hardest problems computer science has ever faced." I think this is
true, and I'd like to tackle why that is. I'm going to do that in a
couple of blog posts, because I think the subject is broad and
complex, and I'd like to offer some perspectives into that chaos.

I've been saying for a while that people like to pay for privacy, when
they understand what the threat to their privacy is, and how the
solution works. Thus, they buy curtains. Curtains work very well to
enhance privacy by stopping passers-by from looking through your
windows. Another part of that talk is that privacy means a lot of
different things to people, ranging from 'the right to be left alone'
to 'informational self-determination' to 'abortion.' I believe that
identity displays very similar properties in how widely the term is
used.

Identity is a problem because it means so many different things about
who we are, and how we perceive ourselves, others, and our
relationships with them. Identity also entails a set of business
relationships, and the experiences and reliance that entities embed
into those relationships. Finally, identity entails a set of
government relationships, some of which are about citizenship, or
various sorts of temporary presence or exclusion, or moneys flowing to
or from the government. Sometimes, these relationships overlap in
various ways.

This relates to Zooko's "Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful"
triangle. Zooko looks at the digital systems for dealing with
identifiers, and the properties those identifiers can have. I want to
start from the variety of relationships, and the way people think
about the relationships, then move to identifiers. Replacing the
actual relationship with a digital identifier often creates issues,
because the two differ.

As we encode various forms of identity onto computers, we make choices
about identifiers and representations. Some of these choices are now
such second nature that actually listing the details them seems
bizarre: "My mail client sends a message to alice at example.com"* vs "I
send mail to mom." We have internalized the idea that an email address
is a good identifier for a person. We tend to internalize these
representations fairly easily, even when its not a good idea.
"123-45-6789 applied for this credit card," that must be Alice
Example.

I'll talk more about the issues of assigning trust or reliance to
identifiers, rather than people, in another post.
"""





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