For Your Information
The new politics of personal information
The hair and the home office
at 2:40pm on Saturday, 6th October 2007
Being pretty geeky, it pleases me when stories that you might assume are a bit tecchie make headline news. So I was delighted to see the BBC all over a story about identity theft, based on an impending report from the All-party Group on Identity Fraud.
Unsurprisingly, and understandably, it has made the news because it is about some potentially serious threats stemming from some very popular behaviour and activities. The group are warning, amongst other things, about the dangers of people's fervent desire to use social networking sites. They think the government should play a role in deepening people's understanding of how useful and valuable the personal details they put online can be to fraudsters - and of the dangers and consequences of being too careless with what we show to who.
What is interesting to us about this stuff is the connections between our willingness to use technology to build incredibly personal profiles and reflections on our everyday experiences, and a technical understanding of identity.
Nielsen//NetRatings statistics from September showed that around 20% of all online Britons used Facebook in August this year, spending an average of around 2 1/2 hours each on the site. But it is difficult sometimes to connect what people do on these sites with 'identity' in a more technical sense - the side of you that businesses or institutions see and interpret. If government wants to intervene, it needs to do a better job of making those connections between on and offline identity.
Niamh and I are currently busy writing the pamphlet on personal information as the grand finale to the FYI project, and similar issues are featuring heavily. We'll be publishing in late November so stay tuned; or get in touch if you have any thoughts.
Incidentally, if it is sometimes difficult to connect these concepts in our heads, which we have certainly found challenging, then fear not. As with so many things, we can leave the hard work to the search engines. Typing in 'identity in the UK' to Google yields the following, helpful result, which I thought was pretty neat:
Unsurprisingly, and understandably, it has made the news because it is about some potentially serious threats stemming from some very popular behaviour and activities. The group are warning, amongst other things, about the dangers of people's fervent desire to use social networking sites. They think the government should play a role in deepening people's understanding of how useful and valuable the personal details they put online can be to fraudsters - and of the dangers and consequences of being too careless with what we show to who.
What is interesting to us about this stuff is the connections between our willingness to use technology to build incredibly personal profiles and reflections on our everyday experiences, and a technical understanding of identity.
Nielsen//NetRatings statistics from September showed that around 20% of all online Britons used Facebook in August this year, spending an average of around 2 1/2 hours each on the site. But it is difficult sometimes to connect what people do on these sites with 'identity' in a more technical sense - the side of you that businesses or institutions see and interpret. If government wants to intervene, it needs to do a better job of making those connections between on and offline identity.
Niamh and I are currently busy writing the pamphlet on personal information as the grand finale to the FYI project, and similar issues are featuring heavily. We'll be publishing in late November so stay tuned; or get in touch if you have any thoughts.
Incidentally, if it is sometimes difficult to connect these concepts in our heads, which we have certainly found challenging, then fear not. As with so many things, we can leave the hard work to the search engines. Typing in 'identity in the UK' to Google yields the following, helpful result, which I thought was pretty neat:
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