Helping you organise and protect your personal information

Monday, May 30, 2011

Linkability?

So you post some information on your website, your blog, or post some pictures on the internet for friends to see. What happens to it then? Can this information be copied, re-used, modified? Yes it can. This is less than ideal as you soon lose control of your information and it is off into cyberspace somewhere for who knows what purpose.

Some would say this is no different to talking to someone and them talking to someone else and soon you do not know who is talking about you. This is OK if it is about things you are happy for people to talk about, in fact this can often be beneficial. But what if you share something personal with someone in confidence and others get to know. You feel your confidence and trust in that person has been breached and this is not OK.

How can we set up similar confidence rules for information we share on the internet to protect ourselves from the openness of the internet when we need it?

Some would say that if you do not want your personal information spread on the internet, then do not put it up there. That may be right sometimes (e.g. just do not put those pictures from the office party up on Facebook). Others will say, make sure you submit such information in password protected areas. But what is stopping other members copying that info and distributing it outside of the protected area.

There are times you need to share information on a confidential matter and discuss it with people you trust. Due to geographical location or the need for input from multiple people, the internet is often the best mechanism in which to do this.

So, in the mean time, you are left with using a search engine to see what is being said about you on the internet and how information about you is being treated, then trying to correct it. Perhaps what we need is some mechanism to link (Linkability?) us to our information or protect sensitive information we do post or submit to the internet. Is there such a mechanism?

Look forward to learning about what views people have in this regard and what initiatives are underway to move us forward in this area.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

What is our identity in the digital world?

As with any new system, it will evolve over time and hopefully improve the way it operates. The Internet has evolved primarily by the construction of individual websites that view the people they interact with as "their" customers and so have set up userID's and passwords to let users enter "their"system.
Of course as more and more websites have been built we the users have had to have more and more UserID's and Passwords the we have to remember to enter each website we want to make use of. Of course each website has different rules and processes for setting userID's and passwords. Some ask you to use your email address, some ask for a unique identifier for you that may not be able to be your name. The passwords can be short or long, capitalised, include symbols etc. which makes it impossible to have the same password (not that we should be using the same password should we).
What we need to evolve to is the Internet seeing individuals as real people who need to access more than one site. This is where the Open ID was formed. The Open ID allows you to use an existing account to sign into multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords.
Click here to find out more about Open ID http://openid.net/get-an-openid/what-is-openid/
More and more websites are adopting Open ID or something like it, including some of the big players like Google and Yahoo. This will help users have a better experience on the Internet over time. Bring it on!
Please let me know if you have used Open ID of something similar and let me know if it is improving the experience on the Internet or if it is creating issues for you.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

There must be a better way!

Today we all have many social networking sites we are connected to, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, You tube, as well as many other sites we may subscribe to. We sign up for each one and they all ask us for more or less the same personal information - Name, email address, credit card details, Zip Code etc.
With each duplication, it increases the number of user-IDs and passwords we you have to remember, the data we need to keep up to date and the risk of that data being out of date or even compromised.
There should be a place where your personal information is stored once, kept up to date once and called on by these various applications rather than having to re enter it each time in each application. For example, if you need to change your address or credit card number you currently need to go to all your sites and change this information. It would be so powerful if we could update this information in one place and it was updated in all sites you use automatically.
I am aware of some attempts at Digital ID's or passports in the past. Is anyone aware of any working versions of this or any info on why that have not worked in the past?
More importantly who would like a service like this?

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Check out this video - Will this be the future?

At the recent Mediasense conference in New Zealand, US futurist David Siegal (purportedly the worlds first Blogger) presented the concept of a Personal Data Locker. Not only did he describe the concept of what our lives could be like if we better managed our personal information, but he presented a video to help us visualise it. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so what is this video worth?
Click on this link to start the video :
Lets get some discussion going on this. What do you think, is his vision achievable? Desirable?