The Future of Your Digital Identity

Are we moving toward an internet in which every website or web service I interact with will first say “Show me your papers”? And then lock me out if I refuse?

On Thursday and Friday I attended a Workshop on User Centric Identity and Commerce (pdf) hosted by my Berkman Center and supported by Microsoft.  A full list of participants is here. I was asked by one of the organizers, Berkman colleague John Clippinger, to attend the gathering in order to bring the perspective of somebody concerned with the human rights implications of future online identity systems.

Despite my horribly over-committed state I felt this was an important meeting to show up for. I wish they had invited political dissidents from authoritarian countries to provide their perspective on how some technological scenarios would play out in places where free speech is not protected, privacy laws are weak, and where corruption is so serious that criminals can access most user data accessible in-country.  I sat next to privacy activist Marc Rotenberg, who runs the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). We found ourselves to be the constant chorus asking “why should we trust this?” and asking hypothetical questions from the user-protection perspective.

I was definitely one of the “identity outsiders” in the room, as many people in the room have been part of a long-standing Identity Gang. Its members are largely Americans and Western Europeans, and while I see a small number of Asian names I don’t think there is anybody on there from the human rights community or whose work is primarily on IT in the developing world. In his opening remarks Microsoft’s “Identity Guy” Kim Cameron stated that we are now at a critical juncture when it comes to the development of identity systems on the web: “What we do in the next two years is going to have very long term repercussions for our society,” he said, “and what we do as technologists will in Lessig's sense be law.” For more on the group’s thinking about identity, see Johannes Ernst’s post, The Identity Landscape of 2006 and Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity. Also see Microsoft’s Vision for an Identity Metasystem.  Why is a new “identity layer” for the internet necessary at all? Most of the group agree with the reasons Cameron outlines in his paper:

“The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to. This limits what we can do with it and exposes us to growing dangers. If we do nothing, we will face rapidly proliferating episodes of theft and deception that will cumulatively erode public trust in the Internet.”

Cameron kicked off the meeting with a demonstration of his new InfoCard identity management system , which I am given to understand may be integrated in some form into the new Windows Vista operating system to be rolled out later this year. Unlike the failed Passport system, Cameron explains that InfoCard will not hold the user’s personal data in one place (thus enabling it to be breached or abused) but gives the user control over how and where her personal data is housed, also giving her the choice of many different “identity brokers” rather than having this role centralized with Microsoft. Technically, explanations of how all of this is meant to work – and how the user’s data might reliably be kept under the user’s control and out of the hands of any one corporate or government actor – was all over my head. Because I’m not a programmer. I wish some of my more technical colleagues like Ethan Zuckerman had been there to pick apart and challenge the system on a truly geek level. (I’ll let Ethan explain on his own blog, if he sees fit, as to why he did not attend.)

I hope that people more technical than I will write up the meeting in more detail. There are a lot of details I can’t even explain adequately due to lack of technical background. However I did come away with a few initial reactions:

After listening to a lot of discussion and disagreement over two days, can see why we need better identity management for commercial transactions, but I am utterly unconvinced as to why it’s necessary for the web in general.  I can see that there is a serious problem with fraud and trust in the commercial space. I do not see a the same problem in the non-commercial aspects of the internet – or at least, I see problems whose solutions are more social and political, not technical. Having any kind of “identity metasystem” that might link into a Tunisian dissident’s anonymous blog (even to that person’s chosen “anonymous identity”), or to a college student’s del.icio.us bookmarks, or a 15–year old’s LiveJournal blog, still strikes me as far too dangerous, with far too many unintended consequences.

After two days, I was encouraged to see that the Identity Gang is serious about privacy and human rights. Or at least they were taking everything that Marc Rotenberg and I were saying very seriously. Cameron said: "We should bring the privacy advocates right into the design process. This is what has to happen, so we can build these things so that time bombs don't emerge."  A number of people also agreed that the human rights community also needs to be brought into this process. I hope that does indeed happen. Over the next few months, I’d like to see the names on the Identity Gang list expanded to include people from Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International, several dissidents from countries such as China, Tunisia, Iran, and Zimbabwe. I’d also like to see names on that list of people from the developing world’s IT sector, so that some new identity layer for the internet doesn’t widen the digital divide even further by making it even harder for people in developing nations to benefit economically from the internet.

From my conversations with people at the meeting, I got the impression that at least the part of the corporate world who were represented in the room is serious about wanting to do the right thing  – recognizing they’ve screwed up massively in China lately, feeling like crap about it, but deep enough now in the quagmire they don’t know what exactly to do about it without hurting business. The experiences of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others in China lately have jolted them into recognizing how communications technologies can have unintended consequences that need to be thought through in the future much more than in the past. There is I think a real desire to engage with activists from the privacy, human rights, and development communities. I came away feeling that engagement by activists can potentially make a difference at this critical juncture, if the engagement happens in a non-confrontational and pre-emptive way. I hope that this engagement will be made possible.

Beyond that, I have some broader concerns about mission-creep. As it so happens, the Identity Gang is part of something called the Social Physics Project, also facilitated by some of my colleagues the Berkman Center. The project aims to help mitigate some of our fears about an identity system by moving control over our information from concentrated powers to the “edge” of the network. Here’s how they describe what they call an “American Revolution 2” in their manifesto:

Today we are not full citizens of the Web. We have no effective voice in how our digital selves are captured, stored, represented, bought and sold.  In short we have no voice in how that most precious and precarious aspects of ourselves, - our multiple digital identities - are governed.

To secure the protections of the state and the benefits of commerce, we are asked to relinquish our individual sovereignty to “higher” authorities – commercial and governmental. The presumptive fear is that there can be no social order without a central authority, a master server to monitor, protect, control and enforce. 

Yet precisely the opposite is what is needed. Effective control, efficient control, adaptive control can not be exercised top down short of a “lock down” that stifles freedom of action, production and expression.

Control is not about removing risk from an organization through preordained action, but a matter of incorporating and distributing risk and the ability to creatively respond to it at those points where change is implemented and consequences experienced. At the Edge. Not at the Center. Not at the peak of the pyramid. But among the many peers that self-organize to make networks work.

Towards Edge Organization

By moving decision rights to the edge, the individual can have both responsibility and control over their digital identities. By creating infrastructures that ensures requisite transparency, fairness and accountability, the power of peer governance enables Libertarian Freedoms while simultaneously ensuring Communitarian Values.

In short, digital technologies afford a new form of scaleable peer governance whereby transparency, fairness, reputation, and accountability can achieve new levels of trusted exchange, and economic diversity and efficiency not imaginable in organizations with fixed hierarchical decision structures.

These new edge organizational forms leverage human beings innate propensities to trust and their innate competences to detect deception.

Great. I’m all for decentralization and user control.

But I don’t think anybody knows what “scaleable peer governance” looks like. Do I detect a whiff of cyber-utopianism?  Can we assume that the outcomes of these structures will play out as expected? And that they won’t be used by evil people to ends we did not imagine?  Nobody at the meeting could be certain that the answer to any of these questions is “no.”

But then the final part of the manifesto (which, to be fair was not discussed at the meeting) really sets off my hooey meter:

Why A Social Physics?

We believe that there is growing evidence from a variety of disciplines, neuro-science, evolutionary psychology, comparative anthropology, neuro-economics, and evolutionary biology that many human social behaviors are very similar to other social species—even those to whom we are not genetically linked. How is it that very similar cooperative strategies and social behaviors emerge in genetically distinct species? The answer is intriguing because it argues that under certain environmental conditions, there are Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESSs) that are independently discovered by different species and embedded in their respective genomes through the trial and error of thousands of generations of evolutionary testing. What this means is that for certain forms of cooperative behavior there are ESSs which naturally appear as the best solutions and that these are governed by innate social protocols and emotions. These emotions and social protocols exist in a variety of genetically distinct species: harvester ants, ravens, wolves, elephants, whales, booboos, chimpanzees, and human beings. Therefore, we argue that there are certain underlying laws—a kind of social physics—that can be abstracted for complex forms of collective behavior and cooperation, independent of the kind of species involved.

The goal of the SocialPhysics project is to create real world online environments – edge organizations - for a variety of human endeavors - where diverse forms of trusted exchange can be tested, scaled, validated and rejected to discover robust forms of social, cultural and economic exchange. In short, create the social technologies of civil societies.

A paper titled A Renaissance of the Commons:  How the New Sciences and Internet are Framing a New Global Identity and Order (pdf) which can be downloaded from the group’s “Stuff We Like” page, states aspirations to steer human evolution.  The authors argue, correctly IMHO, that human activity on the internet creates a great deal of social and cultural value that is not adequately measured (or recognized) by conventional free-market economic models. Fine. But then they write: “Rather than accept our past identity as controlling and immutable, the human species must somehow, as a matter of survival, engineer a new leap in our cultural and moral evolution.” The implication created by the group’s SocialPhysics name and the two paragraphs above is that this group or at least some members of it aspire to play a key role in enabling this human evolution. I am hugely distrustful of cyber-utopianism and people who aspire to create systems that they believe will change human nature for the better. The last major utopian ideology to capture human imagination – Marxism – ended up having some rather nasty consequences unenvisioned by Marx when people like Stalin and Mao went on to implement it.

I’m even more distrustful of a group with utopian claims for the whole human race, but whose participants by no means reflect the ethnic, religious, political, geographical, economic, cultural, vocational, and linguistic diversity of the people on this planet. 

I’m happy to help the geeks build a better, more responsible tool for global online economic transactions that will avoid contributing to human rights violations. I am not interested in helping geeks play God.

Comments

[James]

I hope you weren't guilty of stereotyping and simply walked into a room and because you saw a predominance of European looking folk that none of them could be from oppressed countries?

Are you also assuming that folks from these countries aren't reading blogs?

[keturn]

Can you expand a bit on the "dangers and unintended consequences" of the systems under discussion? Or point us toward material that would serve as a primer on these issues?

That is, I hope you get your wish and the Identity Gang expands to include minds who will be cognizant of these issues, but not all of us technologists are going to have representatives from Amnesty International looking over our shoulders as we work at the drawing board.

[Scott Brison]

You own your digital identity on Ziki and if you don’t want to be a part of our test, there’s no problem
We have members which are suffering of those digital identity hacks. You own your digital identity on Google by blogging but do you own your identity on the whole Google network ?
We’ll put a checkbox at login page to allow the participation on a free trial of the digital identity offer.

[Ads]

You have hit the nail on the head about the privacy and security issues schilled under the guise of vendor agnostic identity storage.
In the vaccum of international legislations, the peer governance technology will be beholden to Hu Jintao Inc. within a year of its implementation.
And by the way, technologically, the proposal merely changes the management of user info like credit card account and pseudonyms from user to a third (and surely not a non-profit) party.