Skip to main content

POST It doesn't get more personal than this

I had the great good fortune to be asked to chair Leadership Workshop on Personal Data at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We had presentations from the US and EU and a global panel to discuss the ways in which digital identity can contribute to a digital society. 

GSMA Ministerial Programme 2016

During the discussions, which obviously in the GSMA context touched on the role of mobile phones in digital identity infrastructure, I began to reflect on the extent to which privacy should be an emergent property of the chosen infrastructure. In other words, can we use the tolls that we have our disposal now (smart cards, biometrics, the internet and so on) to construct a digital identity infrastructure that delivers privacy to citizens in the same way that seat belts deliver safety to drivers: built in, not optional, unobtrusive, cost effective, sensible.

Personal Data Panel

Where’s the seat belt for my digital identity?

Now, I tend to have rather fixed views on this topic, because I’ma big fan of pseudonymity and identity partitioning.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There is no excuse for not taking cards

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...