Saturday, January 22, 2005

Is there such a thing as 'public' and 'private'? I want to start off by saying that I am in agreement with Kim's Fourth Law of Identity ... however it did get me thinking about 'public' and 'private' ... 'omnidirectional' and 'unidirectional' ... The Fourth Law of Identity The Law of Directed Identity A universal identity system MUST support both "omnidirectional" identifiers for use by public entities and "unidirectional" identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles. First, when I think about identity, I now believe that a 'public' identity is really just a 'default' identity. This is what we are willing to expose to anyone, anyplace, and at any time. If I look at the 'real world', we have certain characteristics and behaviors that we are willing to expose when we go out in public. We then might meet up with someone else, and choose to exchange other information 'privately', however we actually reveal something about ourselves even when we perform a 'private' exchange of information. Kim stated: Entities that are public can have identitifiers that are invariant and well-known. These identifiers can be thought of as beacons, emitting identity to anyone who shows up - and thus being in essence "omnidirectional" (they are willing to reveal their existence to the set of all other identities). I agree with this ... for any provider of good or services to be known, they must expose some sort of information to be discovered. It could be that the entity might choose to 'emit this beacon' all of the time ... or maybe to sit quietly waiting for the detection of another entity. In either case, once the 'omnidirectional beacon' has been emitted, there is a way to reference the source entity. What I like is the second example: A second example of such a public entity is the "polycomm" which looms large in the scenario we chose as a backdrop to the present discussion. The polycomm sits in a conference room in an enterprise. Visitors to the conference room can see the polycomm and it offers digital services by advertising itself to those who come near it. In the thinking outlined here, it has an omni-directional identity. This is no really big deal ... it makes common sense ... however: Similarly, when entering a conference room furnished with a polycomm, the omnidirectional identity beacon of that polycomm can be used by the owner of a cell phone to decide whether she wants to interact with it. If she does, a short-lived "unidirectional" identity relation can be created between the cell phone and the polycomm - and used to disclose a single music preference without associating that preference with any long-lived identity whatsoever. I'm not so sure that this is truly 'unidirectional' since there are other artifacts of the 'short-lived unidirectional identity relation' that could be observed. I might not be able to determine the exact details of what is transferred, however I could easily - with the assistance of some others in the room - triangulate on the source of the signal and locate the owner of the cell phone. I could then couple this with other visible or audible information to begin the process of compiling a profile of that person. So is this 'private'? Of course the owner of the cell phone could also collaborate with others in the room to all initiate communications with the polycomm at the same time, and the polycomm could be configured to add random timings to assist with masking the true source of the music preference, however this then still potentially identifies the 'crowd' or 'community' that is the source of the communications. When I was working on digitalMe, I followed the work of the AT&T "Crowds" project ... and also the Lucent Personal Web Assistant project. Both of these convinced me that there might not really be a way to be truly "private" ... and that the best we can hope for is to hide in a crowd. 8:42:18 PM      identity

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