Skip to main content

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker

One of the most important aspects of post-modern identity strategy, as opposed to an Industrial Age identity strategy, is that it is founded on multiple identities.

Elizabeth Andersen puts it succinctly, saying that allowing people to have different identities in different domains is freedom. She says "At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?… That is what it is to be free”.

I have to say that I am very sympathetic to this view. A fundamental defence against inappropriate and dangerous tracking, tracing and monitoring of individuals is to allow them to choose their identities on a per-transaction basis. Not so much “where do you want to go today” of the old Microsoft advertisement, more of a “who do you want to be today”. When I go to do something, I should not be asked “who are you”  and presented with a login but asked “who do you want to be” and presented with a menu.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

new survey results from USA Technologies (USAT) suggest. The payments technology company, which enables electronic payments for self-service machines, compared consumer spending activity at 35 of its vending machines in urban areas with a high concentration of iPhone users between week one and week four of the installation of new digital signage promoting Apple Pay. Consumers made more contactless purchases: The vending machine providers saw an average contactless transaction revenue increase of 89%, implying that consumers are making more mobile payments. This was likely driven by the clear advertisement of Apple Pay. Total transactions increased: Consumers made more purchases overall. This was probably driven by an uptick in mobile payments, given the major increase in contactless transaction revenue. And the vending machines may have attracted many first-time users who were drawn in by the digital advertising of Apple Pay. Boosting awareness is key to unlocking pent-up demand amon...

David | LinkedIn

Alex Todd rather kindly called this a “most lucid explanation of digital identity management” I would highly recommend this presentation to anyone interested in understanding prospective blockchain based identity architectures From David | LinkedIn This is very kind, but as I said in the link, this is thinking out loud and far from a fully-developed solution. We’re working on parts of this for different clients and I can see that there is something there - a genuinely new way of solving some old problems - but it’s early days.

We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...