Carefully Balanced Identities

[deriksmith]

Fortune Tech recently posted an article about Google+, Facebook and the slippery concept of ‘identity’ online. It was a well written, balanced take on the subject, and that was a nice surprise. But what really drew my attention was Theresa Klein’s comment:

Comments

[greenreaper]

Good luck stopping someone from creating a wiki article about you and linking them for you, though.

The concept of privacy is outdated. In time, it will be eliminated. Resistance is futile.

[deriksmith]

Privacy is a function of identity

[jarodrussell]

Have you ever read Halting State by Charles Stross? There's an interesting idea in there about a service that clouds your online identity with a bunch of fake stuff so that if anyone searches for your name they find that you are as interested in Burning Man as you are church bake sales, and that you were at both on the same day. I always thought that was an idea worth implementing.

[deriksmith]

I seem to remember we discussed a browser program which would proxy web activity at random among your nakama to prevent an aggregate profile from being built up. With the amount of in-page data being gathered these days that becomes impractical though. *sigh*

I'll check it out. I've just been ordered to read My Big TOE, so it might take awhile to get to it.