Well, it has finally
begun. The intense identity aggregation of products like Google and
Facebook is pushing users towards anonymous services. Whisper and Secret
are both making headlines, each promising to let you escape in some way from
the ruthless scrutiny of the mainstream social networks. While these
services are great for providing a momentary distraction for their users, they
are still doing nothing to address the core problem of online identity.
In real life, there are
very few situations where it is useful or even desirable to be anonymous
outside of explicitly anti-social or criminal behavior. The standard
examples – corporate leaks, personal confessions, honest reviews, etc. – do not
benefit from true anonymity. Instead, what people want is to expose some
subset of their true identity but nothing more.
For example - if I am an
Apple employee releasing a corporate leak, I don’t want Apple to discover who I
am, but it is still important that others know I am an Apple employee and not
just some random fanboy. Likewise, if I am confessing something about my
personal life, I want to do it with a supportive community and not to strangers
who don’t care about me and with whom I have no lasting relationship.
It isn't about being
anonymous or even pretending to be someone I am not. It is about
controlling which subsets of true facets of my person are relevant in different
social contexts. This is fundamentally not deceptive, but actually
enables one to be authentic.
Outside of the internet,
it is extremely difficult to find out information about a person so that we can
easily and naturally compartmentalize our experiences. I can go to my AA
meeting and discuss my issues with alcohol, and then later I can go to a car
show and discuss my love of 60’s muscle cars. I don’t worry much about
someone in the car show reacting poorly to me because I am an alcoholic.
Again, I am not a different person in these settings – it is always me –
but different parts of my identity are relevant.
The Googles and
FaceBooks (GoogleBooks?) of the world want to aggregate all of these into a
single identity. They want to do this, not because they think this is
good for users or because this is how they think society works, but rather
because it helps them monetize your interactions. However, this type of
aggregation is a very bad deal for users.
Users’ primary
experience with this comes in the form of hyper-targeted ads. A perfect
example of this is when I go to my online AA support community to do some searching
or posting, and then navigate to my car community. In the car community, I receive ads targeting
me as an AA member -- this scares the s*** out of me. Even though users
primarily are reacting to this “Google is stalking me” factor, there is
actually a subtle but much more insidious force at work.
These services are
making an extremely strong push to get you to sign in everywhere on the
internet with a single ID. This is initially great for users because,
who wants to remember so many passwords? But when you do this, GoogleBook
is aggregating your identity into their system, and all activity on that new
site is mixed with everything else you have told them before. Most users
are really unaware that this is undermining the trust relationships that you
have with those new sites.
When I decide to share
information with a service, I make a trust decision that is between me and that
other entity. I can decide to purchase things from Amazon knowing that
Amazon will retain my purchase history and use that to create my “Amazon
Identity”. I am OK with OpenTable knowing where I go out to eat, I trust
my bank with my account information, and I trust my fellow AA members with my
personal struggles. For each of these entities, I have made a conscious
trust decision.
But when I use
GoogleBook for these sign-ins, I am tossing that out the window. I am
implicitly granting GoogleBook the union of all of those trust relationships.
Through GoogleBook, I am giving it away to all of their advertisers and
other players. So, not only am I suddenly trusting GoogleBook with my
Amazon purchase history, I am also potentially trusting OpenTable and Clash of
Clans with that information as well. This is a fundamental undermining of
these original trust relationships, and will lead to very large problems down
the road.
It doesn't have to be this way though, and that’s why my company is working on solving these
problems . Stay Tuned.
