Mitch Ratcliffe of ZDNet posted about the Identity Rape of Allen Herrell. He is one of the accused attackers in the Kathy Sierra controversy, and wrote a long email to Doc Searls explaining that his entire online identity has been compromised.
The dark side of society is emerging and taking advantage of the identity weaknesses in the Internet. It is very sad to see events like these be the drivers for the technology that us in the Identity Gang are working on.
Thoughtful post, Dick. However, I would suggest that intrinsic limitations in biometric and security technologies make it very unlikely that we will ever be able to tie the physical and virtual spheres of identity together with sufficient reliability to rule out the possibility of this kind of horror recurring. In fact, the closer we get to the unattainable goal of absolute identity assurance, the higher the prize for troll hackers who manage to break a system that is popularly assumed to purvey "true" identity information.
As an entrepreneur and inventor, I see this as a challenge to be overcome. There are two problems here:
1) ensuring that someone else cannot manage my online resources
2) linking my online presence to my physical self
(1) can be mitigated with the "right" technology
(2) is a social issue
a minor point loosely tied to identity: his first name is spelled Alan and not Allen. (I made this mistake myself in some early blog posts on the incident, because Sierra spelled it that way.)
Thanks for the clarification!
I am very interested in this discussion and have posted the question on my blog (April 3rd), "as various flavors of social media collide, maintaining a consistent digital persona across various platforms becomes a challenge." I am particularly interested in the development of Web 3.D and virtual worlds as part of positive global development. I would be very interested to hear you thoughts about how "identity 2.o" relates to "identity 3.D" as I am writing a post on this!
VANTEC-v1.key.pdf