Please make sure to watch this movie when you get a chance.

It’s opening theatrically in NYC this Friday for the first time. I saw the film at Social Web FooCamp in April, met and spoke with Ondi and Josh, and had some great discussions around identity, performance, and our senses of self and each other.

It was fascinating to be a part of the conversation with the people building out today’s state-of-the-art communication technologies (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) and the ones who have already seen the future. My mind raced for a few days afterwards.

Go see We Live In Public.

Deep Throat
A few years ago now, in 2005, the world finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. He had remained pseudonymous for over 30 years. Mark Felt came forward himself when he allowed the release of his name in a Vanity Fair article by his attorney. The disclosure was on his terms. He decided to end the secrecy before he died.

This is something that I claim would be impossible in today’s interconnected and recorded world. Are there stories today that are being published where the sources are on “deep background” and the public is clamoring to know the source’s identity?

The Fake Steve Jobs
The Fake Steve Jobs had a good thing going with his blog The Diary of Fake Steve. He was continually witty and received rave reviews for his poking fun at the mystery and aura that is Apple and Steve Jobs, proper. Of course, over time, his identity was revealed by the New York Times to be Dan Lyons. And like Felt, there was a book deal shortly thereafter. The ruse lasted 14 months — much longer than expected.

“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long … I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.” — Lyons

He has since taken up the writing as Fake Steve again – and it’s still just as funny – but without the cloud of intrigue as to who would be so bold…

_why the lucky stiff
Yesterday, _why, a fairly well known programmer in the web2.0 space apparently deleted his online presence. This is news, regardless, but what’s more interesting is that “_why” is a pseudonym and so far, we don’t know for whom. He has deleted his accounts, his blogs, his code and for now, the community of programmers and hackers have yet to unearth his identity. The thread at ycombinator seems to be getting close – I suspect it is only a matter of hours before we get some confirmation.

John Resig posted a remarkable eulogy (his word) to _why:

At this moment, _why’s online presence appears to be no more. All of his sites and code are gone. This includes, and is not limited to:

* http://twitter.com/_why
* http://github.com/why
* http://whytheluckystiff.net/
* http://poignantguide.net/
* http://hackety.org/
* http://shoooes.net/
* http://hacketyhack.net/
* http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Two conjectures are common at the moment: His account(s) were hacked and sites taken down or he simply decided to delete his online presence. I personally believe that he did this deliberately and with some amount of forethought.

Still Hidden?
What examples do we have where we still don’t know who is behind a widely-known* piece or body of work? Does it still happen? The timeframe for the ability to remain unknown is correlated with visibility, no doubt.

I’d love to keep a list somewhere…

A fake-officer convinced a small town for 5 months that he was a federal agent.

How does this happen? A sustained message of fear for years and the repeated mantra of trust of those in power coupled with a man who looked and sounded the part.

That said, it’s refreshing how quickly these things can be unraveled when the right questions are asked (and people do their jobs).

Those who wish to perpetuate a lie will go to great lengths. We can never completely prevent it, but we can create infrastructure that raises the bar for those trying to hide and deceive. Good tools, vigilance, and a little skepticism on the part of the deceived can go a long way to prevent this type of thing from happening near you.

“Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor”

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

The 51-year-old reporter apparently used about an hour on “the computer” after finding Mr. Jakob’s real name and uncovered enough to end the ruse.

I find that to be extremely comforting.

OpenID is in the air, and providing services across domains will become very important very soon. I think we’re still about six months out from the Big Bang. August. I’m calling it.

Verification underlies Identity. Identity underlies claims about a person. Aggregated claims underlie the reputations we ascribe to people. With reputation, we can do really cool stuff. And it’s coming…

Cross-posted at claimID proper:

ClaimID allows real people to aggregate what is online about themselves. It allows them to bring links together, sort them, talk about them, and generally refocus their online identity on their own terms. We’ve had great success so far in getting that message out – and the feedback we’ve received has been positive. People really like the empowerment and are pleased when their claimID page begins to appear in the search results for their name.

But we also want to convey that these links are validated – verified in some way. So we introduced MicroID and OpenID to our system. Since that time, people have been pointing to their own websites, their own blogs, and their own OpenIDs hosted at other Identity Providers (AOL, Verisign, JanRain, Livejournal, etc.). And with all of those identities, it made sense for us to create a trusted place for you to aggregate them.

Verified Page

Today, we launched a special page for each person that brings these verified links into greater focus. The verified information about a person is presented all on one page, in one place – and you can be sure that these links are maintained by the person who owns the claimID account because of the math behind the scenes. MicroID and OpenID are based on strong hashing algorithms and cryptography and have been designed to validate and verify claims – just the sort of thing we’re doing at claimID.

Our pages are at:
- http://claimid.com/terrell/verified
- http://claimid.com/fred/verified

They’re very clean and very powerful.

Once you find someone’s claimID Verified Page, you can be pretty sure that who you’re reading about at claimID is the same person at all those other sites. This allows us to really begin to tap into the power of distributed identity and maybe even hint at some uses for basic reputation across disparate websites. Of course, if you don’t want to display your verified identity, you can easily turn this off in your account settings.

We’re not done with online reputation yet, but the single verified page at claimID is a very strong early step.

We retooled the documentation, made it more apparent to the new user the benefits of having and using an OpenID and generally tidied up our original copy as we prepare for that “big growth” that we keep seeing poke its head around the corner.

From the official blog post:

At ClaimID, our strength has always been translating the complex into the simple. We want to give you the best solutions, without requiring you to read a protocol or understand code. As web identity plays a greater role in all of our lives, we feel that we can really help people by enabling them with solutions simply. And as OpenID grows (and it will grow, says Bill Gates), we want to be there to help you take advantage of this amazing and useful tool.

We’ve seen lots of convergence in the last few months – and even more in the last couple days – and we want to make sure we’re helping as many people as possible follow along at home.

Scott Kveton from JanRain has a nice writeup on the latest happenings:

OpenID has always been about convergence. When Brad, David and Johannes talked about how OpenID and Yadis could work together over a year ago. When the XRI folks brought their amazing people and technology to be integrated into OpenID 2.0 last Spring. This past Summer when Sxip Identity joined the OpenID party by joining in on developing the specification and offering up their attribute exchange specification to the OpenID community. And now today, we have a commitment from Microsoft to take part in the OpenID community as well as enable the technology for their future identity products.

There are a couple of points I’d like to make outside of the above announcement to hopefully address any concerns that the OpenID community might have:

• JanRain will never require users of our libraries or services to use Windows CardSpace ™. We offer support for this technology as another option for users much like using our Safe SignIn and Personal Icon technologies on MyOpenID.com. We’ll also continue to support the OpenID efforts going on with Mozilla and Firefox.
• Windows CardSpace ™ is shipping with Vista today and is a well thought-out technology that helps address many of the privacy and security concerns that people have had with OpenID. OpenID helps users describe their identity across many sites in a public fashion. The two together are very complimentary products and each has its strength.
• Microsoft did not cave in to the OpenID community and the OpenID community is giving nothing up to Microsoft. This is a collaboration on bringing the best technology to the marketplace as quickly as possible to help secure users and solve the single sign-on solution once and for all.
• Please reserve judgment on what this all means until you see it all work together. The technology is really quite simple and the ramifications for end-users is huge. It also goes a very long way to completely addressing the phishing concerns we’ve heard so much about.

A compelling visual no doubt – I think it’s a great way to describe to those who have not really thought about how their information is aggregated, redistributed and shared once they send it out. Shortly after he wrote about this illustrative analogy, he was informed that his own site was blocking crawlers via his robots.txt file. The irony was not lost on him:

A comment from Mark Middleton perfectly illustrates the point I was making the other day about visualizing your published surface area. I started this blog in December, and ever since I’ve been running with a robots.txt file that reads:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

In other words, no search engine crawlers allowed. Of course that’s not what I intended. I’d simply assumed that the default setting was to allow rather than to block crawlers, and it never occurred to me to check. In retrospect it makes sense. If you’re running a free service like WordPress.com, you might want to restrict crawling to only the blogs whose authors explicitly request it.

WordPress.com’s policy notwithstanding, the real issue here is that these complex information membranes we’re extruding into cyberspace are really hard to see and coherently manage.

We’re all learning and probing and figuring out this new medium, even 10-15 years on now. We’re struggling with the abundance of information, and concurrently, the distinct lack thereof. We can connect with people from anywhere, at anytime, assuming they’re connected and watching the same streams of information. And yet, we cannot see who’s watching, who’s aggregating and saving for later.

Thanks, Jon, for the nice analogy. I’ll use it myself, with a link back, of course – so you can sense it.

In addition to being insightful in their own right, Eliazar Parra has posted about how blogs are comics and wikis are movies…

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

He then points out how the sequence of individual posts are what tell the true story, the shifting of space and the filling in of the ‘rest’ by the reader are what give blogs their interestingness.

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

What we write says a lot about who we are – and don’t think for a second that the signaling we’re doing with this new medium isn’t solidifying our identities in the world. For good or bad – what we write is who we are. And the longer and more we write, the richer that picture (comic strip, perhaps) becomes.

When reading someone’s blog, reflect on the things that aren’t written as much as the things that are. Reflect on what isn’t shown, on what isn’t laid bare.

And then reflect on your own. What is it that we say to the world? And then, again, when we don’t say a thing?

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They’re going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it’s far more prevalent than you’d ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

• Focusing on “lock-in” will fail with these teens – they don’t care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.
• Teens are not looking for universal anything; that’s far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.
• Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven’t found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.
• The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

Which led me to the Slashdot article entitled “Social Networks Fatigue Coming?“. The discussion tried very hard to be about standards and consolidation and the coming possibilities for “profile migration” between services. All of this is a rehash of the same old discussions about email federation that happened 20 years ago. Same as the ongoing 10+ years of graphical IM use that has yet to consolidate/decentralize around a standard (Jabber/XMPP playing the leading role of spoiler/hero at this point).

If these social networks are going to settle on some standard set of portable profile data, it will be so watered down that there’s very little incentive for any established player to play along. If this is going to happen, it has to happen from the ground up. But that’s not even the point of this post.

The Slashdot discussion also turned to the projected identity of users who have multiple accounts, abandoned accounts and one-time accounts that were created simply for access to a single group of people. These users do not plan on maintaining the accounts they create. They are predominantly younger, and less concerned with what they did/said yesterday mattering tomorrow.

circletimessquare wrote:

plasticity of identity, the throw away indentity [sic]. it makes sense for teenagers and their psychological development as they grapple with exactly who they are: try on one identity, throw it away, start over. it also means that the generation that grows up with the web from birth will be very used to the idea of identities being disposable, for themselves, and in how others act towards them as well

this opens up new weaknesses in social interaction, and new strengths. in a world where identity theft is a growing menace, why would that matter when your identity is made of mercury anyways? at the same time, how can anyone be trusted in a world where the idea of a solid identity is built on a foundation of sand?

i see weird confluences of unseen consequences coming out of the new plasticity of identity due to how the web works in the generation currently in their teens, making its way into their very psychology. in ways us ancient fossils in our 20s and 30s won’t even understand

“bah, kids these days”

And ScrewMaster replied:

I dunno. “Plasticity of identity” is all well and good until you go try and apply for a mortgage, or manage a career. Plastic people tend to get their attitudes readjusted real fast, when society eventually expects them to go through their stock of alternate personas and pick one.

Besides, young people have always put on different faces, different attitudes, experimenting to see what kind of reaction they provoke. This social-networking fad is nothing more than an extension of the normal social exploration that we all go through. Yes, it may have unexpected effects but there’s a reason why you mostly see young people playing with their profiles like this. It’s because we eventually figure out that, underneath it all, we’re just who we started out to be anyway. At that point most of us drop the pretense. It takes too much effort to maintain.

I think ScrewMaster has said it most clearly – it’s about societal expectations. This shuffling and searching will come to an end for the vast majority of young people using these tools today as soon as they figure out who they are. Outside of the talk (Fred) (danah) about whether these tools will look quaint and silly themselves in a few years – will these young people care what happens to all the footprints they’re leaving behind? Will they hope the sites just go away/offline? Will they actively delete their rotting personal information – information, while no longer true, isn’t exactly false either… ?

Or will they simply pick a public face, run with it – and hope for the best?

Will any of this matter when the hiring managers themselves did the same thing just a few years prior?

I think in large part this is the most obvious answer for the most people…

It takes too much effort to maintain.

Our identities will collapse on themselves, digital and physical, and plasticity as strategy, while available, will be rarely used by the majority of people who conduct any online activity (read: everyone).

A copy of the bill’s text obtained by News.com shows that McCain wants to require every “Internet social networking site, chat room, message board, or any other similar service using the Internet” to report suspected child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Um, and that’s going to work exactly how?

In 1998, also in Washington, DC, Eric Friedman and Paul Resnick presented an early version of a paper entitled “The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms“.

On the Internet it is easy for someone to obtain a new identity. This introduces opportunities to misbehave without paying reputational consequences. … One might hope for an open society where newcomers are treated well, but there is an inherent social cost in making the spread of reputations optional.

It seems to me that creating new email addresses and IM names, free and instant ones that require no background checks and certainly no prior “reputations” before registration, pretty much does an end-run around this particular bit of “keep our children safe” legislation.

It would be quite impossible to enforce.

Additionally, it puts a burden on the ISP and particular site owners to begin worrying and policing their own users-created content on their networks and forums. Yet another non-starter.

Is this just a bit of posturing? Does McCain really think this will work?

More by Declan McCullagh over at CNET:

“This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts,” said EFF’s Bankston. Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services, he said.

A McCain aide, who did not want to be identified by name, said on Friday that the measure was targeted at any Web site that “you’d have to join up or become a member of to use.” No payment would be necessary to qualify, the aide added.

One teacher said that a parent printed out his daughter’s MySpace page and told her he was going to post it at the mall. When the daughter objected, mortified, the parent explained that MySpace is as public as the mall.

I love this.  Online identity *is* public.

In fact, it’s *more* public, because it’s persistent and searchable.

Kudos to Dad.

The students of the Facebook are currently working through the newfound reality of their complete Facebook activity being front-and-center to all their ‘friends’. The new mini-feed of their activity within Facebook (comments, notes, adding/removing of pictures, friends and groups) is now broadcast to all their friends’ dashboards automatically and without their consent. As of today, there is not an option to remove this functionality either – mini-feed items can only be deleted after the fact.

i love information. i love my friends. i love information about my friends; however, i don’t like everyone knowing information about what my friends and I do. good networking is like good flirting: leave something to the imagination!

There are two views of these mini-feeds:

1) A user looking at their own page sees a reflection of all their friends’ activity within the system for the last couple weeks – a ‘fortnight story’ of their friends’ activities/updates.

2) A user looking at another user’s page will see what that particular user has been up to the last couple weeks – a ‘fortnight story’ for someone else.

I think this move was inevitable and I applaud it. But I’ve got a longer view than someone using the Facebook today. I would be upset if my information was suddenly available like this. I am not sure why they didn’t have a smaller rollout with some feedback testing. I feel they’re going to get burned by public opinion in the days to come.

I agree, this new facebook is ridiculous! It makes me want to remove my account. I don’t want everyone knowing what I am doing at all times…it has become creepy. Please change it back!!

Normal is shifting.

The users of the Facebook were living in a dream world. Of course their activity was being logged – it’s how Facebook became Facebook. It’s just that the users of the site, until today, didn’t expect their information to be aggregated in quite this way – simply because it hadn’t happened before. And I feel sorry for those who have been ‘outed’ by this system and will continue to feel the brunt of these changes in the next few days as the changes propagate and begin to have a ripple effect on behavior within the system.

I don’t want everybody seeing who i friended, whose wall I wrote on, and when I change my relationship status everytime they sign on. This is a total violation of everyones [sic] privacy. We all hate it. If we want to see something about someone, we will go to their profiles our selves.

This information – this activity information – was already public. It was already part of a public discussion that the users were engaged in by being a member of the community. These students were spreading their political views, their personal habits, their class schedules and friendship networks for all to see (well, all within the Facebook). However, they had the luxury of assuming that most of the people looking at them would have to dig for that information themselves. Someone who wanted the aggregated view of a new aquaintance had some work to do. There was some social friction to knowing too much. And this was comforting – to a point. There was a barrier to entry that insulated the students from the reality.

This change brings them kicking and screaming into the light.

I love facebook, I really do, but this “new facebook” is not improved, it’s horrible! I dont want everyone to know what I am always doing! I wonder what we can do to have it changed?

What we’re seeing is the birth pains of a third generation of social networking.

The first generation was email/IM buddy lists. These allowed us to connect and keep track of our people across distance and time in a way that was more efficient and more seamless than ever before. We knew who was on our lists and we managed the connections. Visibility was limited but we were hooked.

The second generation is our current crop led by Friendster and now MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook. These sites allow for users to keep track of one another and add a layer of visibility that was quite dramatic when first ‘discovered’. Users were very excited about sharing pictures and collecting as many friends as possible because all these were visible to those who were watching. It was like the mall and middle school all over again. To be seen was the thing.

The third generation will expose the history of this visibility. The full history of what you’ve done in the network. A record of how you’ve behaved in the past will be available in the future. This will (and should) affect your behavior and your friend lists and your decision about which pictures to post.

I really don’t care, i think its a bad move to make it default on with no opt out… …i’m just worried that i will be caught in lies… like saying i am busy working on something, add a friend, and have another friend know i was lying to them, because at 7:34pm i was on facebook…

And this is a good thing – as it mirrors the real world. You shouldn’t lie to your friends. As I’ve said before, the real world is a quaint place where actions matter and people remember. It’s also a place where this virtual overlay we’re playing in today will be taken for granted in only a few very short years. The decisions you make online today will, and should, matter tomorrow.

Students of the Facebook… Play hard, but play smart – and know that everyone is watching.

P.S. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I expect Facebook to make these mini-feeds optional very shortly. The feedback has been very loud. That said, a dose of reality this big is understandably hard to take.

Update: Just over two days later and the first changes are live.  They’ll survive just fine.

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.George Felix Allen (born March 8, 1952, in Whittier, California) is a Republican United States Senator from Virginia. He is running for re-election in 2006 and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2008 Presidential election. He has recently been involved in a number of controversies, most prominently his use of the word “macaca.”

I love that disclaimer at the top. Don’t you? Self deprecation and honesty, and therefore, authority on the matter (and 63 references at the time of this writing).

Earl Mardle is all over this new media thing. He’s hit it out of the park and deserves a pat on the back. The power continues to move down the food chain and we’re seeing the toddler years ahead of us now. The 2008 race will be something quite instructive indeed.

New Media With Fangs

When Jim Webb’s campaign for a Virginia Senate seat assigned a worker to attend all the public events of the incumbent George Felix Allen, they made an extremely shrewd move.Gathering intel on your opponent is SOP, but doing it with a video camera in public was a new wrinkle, and it plainly annoyed, perhaps unnerved Mr Allen, who eventually unloaded on the cameraman. The cameraman’s family came from India, and Allen was careless enough to lift the corner of his racist rug and let out the French racist epithet, Macaca.

Boy was that bad tactics. Not only was his racism immediately available on the net, and eventually in the corporate media who could no longer ignore the gathering furore, as it eventually caught up with the Trent Lott racism thing, but it sent the liberal blogosphere on a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” search of the net.

And now the whole game is rolling out like an anchor chain. Finding the photo of Allen posing with the leading lights of the Council of Conservative Citizens was only the start, Jeffrey Feldman took it further and produced a full scale research article on Allen’s racist connections, with chapter, and verse. Frameshop: Allen’s Political Klanbition

Within days, Allen’s previously strong campaign was in trouble, Webb was within the margin of error in the polls and Allen was steppin and fetchin all over the state, trying to stay out of the firing line and keep intact his former presidential ambitions.

I’ve always said that the net shifts the locus of power and control, it takes it away from the traditional owners and gives it to the wider community. It remembers and it aggregates, and it is merciless. Or as Feldman says in his piece.

In 1996, when George Allen posed for the picture, it was hard to imagine that only ten years later that the circumstances surrounding the photo, plus similar circumstances, would be so widely accessible to people beyond the semi-clandestine membership of the CCC. But now they are.

But it gets worse, because if one republican insider was working the CCC track, there’s a good chance there are others. So now the citizen journalists are researching the CCC itself, looking for the reverse links to the Republican party.

No doubt someone in the CCC will soon wake up to the risks and start cleaning out the website. However, you can bet that someone already has a full copy of the site contents to sift at their leisure. Which is a nasty lesson that ABC TV in the US is learning.

After finding itself in the middle of a storm about a biased and politically motivated “docudrama” on the path to 911, ABC tried to pull down the blog it was running on the programme; mostly because the promotional value was being shredded by very pointed and aggressive comments from those who found the timing and the content to be unacceptable in a supposedly independent media organisation.

If you go to the ABC site right now you’ll find the blog missing, but as with the stoush over the censoring of the NYTimes Ombudsman’s blog, someone already has the copy.

Is it any wonder that the people who have controlled the message, the medium and the money for so long, want to remake the net in their own, previous, image?

Earl gets five points.

1) You post information online about yourself in various places
2) It gets aggregated by bot or human
3) Bad guy decides you’re worth screwing with
4) Bad guy finds all this information and can act on it accordingly

Pretty straightforward.

(We also realize that #1 and #2 are not necessary for #3 and #4 to happen)

Today, I find a story on Slashdot with all these elements represented:

http://dumblittleman…/how-to-get-robbed-killed-or-stalked-by.html
Death by Google Calendar: How I Identified you to rob you

(Apparently, it too has undergone some reconsideration – note the title vs. the URL)

I am not picking on this woman but I needed to show a real example. There are tons of public calendars far more revealing than this one. In literally 20 minutes, I now know the name, address, phone number and schedule of this woman. If I can do it, you can be damn sure the real bad guys can. Please be smarter about what you share online. If given a choice, choose the private setting. If you are not given a choice, either choose a new calendar or talk in some code that only you understand. I guess I just don’t understand why people set themselves up to become victims.

There’s nothing really interesting in the story except the way it played out.

I mean, we know that “public information” means it’s public. If someone decides to post something online, then it’s online. It can be crawled, saved, searched, found, archived and refound later. It can also be aggregated, resyndicated, blogged or forwarded. There are entire websites devoted to this aggregation of interesting things – it’s how I found the post in the first place.

That said, there’s nothing new in what was posted. What’s interesting here is how he went about doing it and how little foresight he displays by using real information about someone.

The poster himself now has to deal with the emotional trauma (apparently not so much) of having posted the personal information of this young woman and her housemates. Perhaps more importantly, the young woman herself has to deal with the emotional and potentially physical fallout of being made the posterchild of “How to stalk someone 101″. This is not fair to her at all. And the author should have considered this before making her the object of his ‘research’.

While he and his two friends are positioning their site as “Tips for Life”, they’ve crossed the invisible but morally obvious line of someone else’s personal space. This young woman’s sense of identity and safety has been violated by this posting of personal information. Her trust in the world has probably been knocked down a notch or four. This, to me, is an unacceptable use of the power of “making a point” in any public forum, especially one that’s electronic and archived. The author neglected to consider this (we hope) before making her an example. If the consideration was made and somehow deemed insufficient, then it’s even worse.

Additionally, the comments attached to the original post eventually included a message from the girl’s friend who first woke her with this information on a holiday weekend as well as messages from the girl herself and a close friend. You can read the frustration and loss of control in their words.

First of all, being the topic of discussion suddenly, I would have greatly appreciated a heads-up on this whole article before hving [sic] a friend call me at 6am to alert me that I’ve been publicly cyber-stalked.

Secondly, I admit my own stupidity for listing the calendar as public, a problem that has quickly been fixed, but two things: you could have

1. notified me before posting this article so I could have locked my calendar before having the whole world view it, and

2. used a PSEUDONYM?? For somebody not “thinking bad guy thoughts,” you’ve already endangered me and those who live around/with me by posting my name and screen shots of my calendar.

So thank you in advance for all the lovely stalkers and real “bad guys” out there who now have this information thanks you you. I realize you used my calendar to make a point, but you have also seriously upset me by ACTUALLY endangering me now that slashdot and whoever the hell else has read this article.

I’ve been wanting to post examples of how not to post personal information online for a long time. I’ve wanted to share my own Tips for Life but in every case, have come to the conclusion that it’s not fair to single anyone out. I can only sleep at night if I’m not part of the problem.

Teaching a “Paranoia 101″ course might be in my future at some point, but I will definitely not be using previously unaggregated and obscure personal information of young women whom I’ve not contacted ahead of time and asked for consent.

I agree with the original author – be smart, be vigilant, don’t post things you’re not willing to actually let the whole world see.

But I also feel very strongly that the author, in this case, has crossed a very important line and should realize the instructive benefit afforded by his post does not outweigh the personal trauma caused to this young woman. It’s not fair and there are better ways to make a point.

The network brings us closer – but we’re still people and we should consider our actions.

Like she said, he’s really no better at this point than the actual bad guys who might use this information against her.

But the unintended consequences of all that data being compiled, stored and cross-linked are what Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington, called “a ticking privacy time bomb.” [NYTimes]

Every search is being remembered and potentially could be aggregated later with unknown consequences. Every email we send works via a store-and-forward technology (your email is a postcard much more than a sealed postal service letter). Every hop along the way (average of 10-15?), the email servers could save your email for later. Subpeanas anyone? To protect the children?

“All of this is dangerous enough. But recent actions of the United States Attorney General and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week raise an even larger threat to privacy and security. In the interests of prosecuting child abuse cases, the AG and the FBI Director have asked that the ISP’s retain all of their records just in case someday, somehow, for some reason, the government may want them in some future case.” [Mark Rasch]

It’s not fearmongering, it’s a healthy dose of reality and risk analysis.

So first of all, we’re not anonymous. Second of all, this non-anonymity can be assumed by someone else if the procedures and protections we put into place are poorly thought out.

So I find it interesting today this juxtaposition of an Iraqi child holding a piece of cardboard claiming he’s Rupert Murdoch, owner of MySpace, performing the ‘MySpace salute’. Probably, being the actual Rupert, there is little chance Rupert’s real identity will be compromised by this wonderful image. Those of us who are not Rupert, in name or in financial stature, have a significantly greater risk associated with issues concerning our online identity and attempts to hijack it by others.

We need to become more aware, vigilant, informed, and proactive about our online identities. Our public face is a growing part of our reputation and is beginning to play a significant role in our day to day lives. There are early adopters who have seen this effect for a few years now, but the mainstream media is now catching on and the average citizen will begin to interact with these issues very directly. We all swipe the grocery store member cards to save 10%. Do we know what can be done with data mining and aggregation over time?

ClaimID is using MicroID to allow individual users to claim the pages online about them. This uses cryptographically robust mathematics to confirm that the pages on both ends of the claim are legitimate. It’s proactive, it’s reproducable, and it’s open. It’s not a piece of cardboard. Rupert cannot claim that my weblog is his. Neither can that Iraqi child.

We need more awareness so our policies are better. I’m afraid, however, that it requires us to endure a listing of a few million customers like Thelma before the rest of us wake up.

The two things I notice most about online reputation at this point in time is that everyone has an opinion and that the tools are so rough (read: bad). Usually the opinions are strong. Anyone who has bought or sold something online, determined whether someone is date-worthy, or investigated who edited the One True Wiki has an opinion about what they want and what could be better.

We talked about eBay and Amazon, claimID and my theory on consolidation of self. I was surprised by the lack of squirming that usually appears when I begin talking about how I think there will be very little public anonymity in the future. Private transactions, we’ll have covered – you’ll be able to purchase something from those you already trust with a minimum of credential passing, as your physical-world credentials and prior history will do just fine. Publicly purchasing something from a stranger, however, will require a trust and reputation that will be provided by third parties and confirmation services.

Since spamming a reputation requires more friction than spamming (artificially inflating) an eBay score or an Amazon persona, these transactions will become more secure. As the bar rises for what the ‘average’ consumer expects (they currently expect a little lock in the bottom corner of the browser), all our ships rise. The friction and effort required to create and maintain a ‘fake’ persona, in order to scam someone, will climb as well.

The group in Room C seemed to buy this argument and, to a man, agreed that we were going to consolidate our public selves in this way. Does that mean that I am very convincing? Does it mean I’m simply the one who has thought about this the most of the people in the room? Or am I actually right? What am I missing? Why is it so obvious?

Boy do I need some numbers to back this stuff up.