Rob Hof wrote a post about Identity 2.0:
Honestly, I don’t know if Identity 2.0, or something like it, will solve all the problems. Some people–perfectly good people with insightful opinions–simply don’t want to be identified in some circumstances. Their employers may object. They’re worried about government intrusion. Maybe they’re just shy. Seems like it’s going to be tough for one identifier to suffice for all the different kinds of things we do online. But then you’ve got the same problem of who’s really whom all over again.
A goal of Identity 2.0 is to mimic aspects of identity transactions that work well in the physical world. We all have different personas depending on context. I present different aspects of myself depending on wether I am interacting with my mother, my friends, my employees, a server at a restaurant, or my banker. In the online world, we will need the same way to compartmentalize our identity in ways so that we present subsets depending on context. There is no need or desire for a single, global identifier. A logical progression of this is the ability to have a 1:1 relationship, where a given persona is used only at one site, providing anonymity between sites.
With respect to comments on a blog. We envision the commenter needing to build up a reputation over time, and it would be associated with a particular persona. Since it takes a sequence of good behavior to build a positive reputation, there is a cost to that reputation, that good netizens will want to preserve if having a good reputation provides additional value.
And what if I told you that I had a system that could, with a fair degree of reliability, link together multiple personas, email addresses, accounts, screennames, and any of the various representations that "identity" takes these days, simply by crawling information on websites and in public records? (I’m working on a background-checking algorithm of sorts.)
I’ve talked about this issue at length on my blog, and in the comments of other people’s blogs, and honestly, given the output of the system I’ve been working on, I don’t believe that the average person is capable of the intense consistency required to maintain unlinked multiple personas.
I mean, given just an email address as an input, my program has on occasion, even managed to dig up social security numbers (usually as a result of a university using them as a student ID number, a practice that is thankfully no longer allowed anywhere).
And if I can do it, so can anyone else.
Hey Bob, our work on an Identity 2.0 system makes it much easier, and in some ways, more transparent, for the user to silo different personas. Of course, if they use the same email address across personas and share it with all the sites, they are all linked — but there is an easy way to solve that for users as well since the user data is being manageed automaticly — generate a different email for each site, that all route back to the users real email, something that helps solve spam as well.
First, sxore and comments on your blog are frustratingly unintuitive. Where’s the "reply" button? It looks like comments are threaded, since your reply to me was indented, but I see no option to reply to your previous comment.
Second, sxore is showing its innards when errors occur. Lots of innards.
And email addresses aren’t the only things that can link personas. Any inverse functional property will do that quite handily, and many other properties can be used in conjunction to probabalistically link personas. I can just as easily link two personas together with your ICQ number or Jabber account as with an email address.
Threading is more complex then the common case of the blog author replying to a comment. Seemed useful to seperate comments from replies. Now you can just write another comment. Threading is possible in the future. Like any other app, we will get driven by what people ask for and use. Thanks for the feedback.
wrt. sxore innards, would you be kind enough to let us know what the issue was?
wrt. emails linking personas. Yes, any unique identifier can link personas. There is a whole conversatoin going on about this on a the [email protected] mail list.
wrt thread: Well, honestly, I prefer the more common system of having the blog’s author get their comments displayed in a different color, but otherwise they remain within the normal cronological order.
wrt innards: It was a pretty big dump from Catalyst showing all kinds of neat stuff. I assume it was the result of writing a comment that was much too long. (I changed it to the greatly abbreviated one above.)
wrt idworkshop: That’s all fine and good, but the idworkshop is viewable by invitation only.
what is the deal with userbase.org is it id2.0 ?
Hard to tell from the site what userbase.org does.
Two years later, are we ready for Identity 3.0?
I don’t think Identity 2.0 has arrived yet.
Our work is having this discussion as well, regarding a person’s identity vs remaining anonymous when sharing public information, which can result in a people search to locate their personal information, etc. Most people would like to share their thoughts without risking being found or jeopardizing their career.
Monica