In real life (=IRL in geekspeak), my identity is usually my full name (period). Sometimes, it's "that guy from that company, you know... the one with a beard". The way I usually proove my identity is with my passport with I carry all the time, and that I hand out every week to some customs official around the world.
As a non-European national, I also carry a resident card, that I show along with my passport. I never had a national ID card, since they are only given to nationals living in the country (at least where I come from).
Every now and then, I am also asked to provide authorities with a birth certificate, which I gladly do.
Other proxies of my identity are my phone numbers, in particular my mobile phone number which is supposedly very personal.
Summary: IRL, my ID is my name proven by my passport, and 2 other documents.
Now, the big question for which I really don't have an answer, what is my digital identity ?
On the one hand, on the Internet, I can pretend to be anyone I like really, opening email accounts with free services (from a Web cafe, making it very anonymous), setup web pages with fake IDs. Nothing too different than what I could do IRL, but more easily.
On the other hand, I maintain many different legitimate identities on the internet, and that is creating a confusion:
email
I use for example separate emails accounts to address separate communication needs: I have one for friends, one for the family, one for my business, one when I work with a client, one when I work with one of our investees, one for receiving newsletters, etc. I agreggate all these accounts into mainly one mail program (Thunderbird), and I maintain some sort of organization with different mailboxes.
I have configured all my IDs to look almost the same (same name), although my signature files are different, and I try to stick to my relevant ID with the counterpart. Nevertheless sometimes, a person gets 2 or more different email addresses from me, and they get confused, cc-ing me on all addresses (which I don't need, since I get all emails).
This is even more an issue when changing email providers (such as ISPs or companies), or email addresses (due to too much spam for example).
Recreating all my digital-IDs in another program is tedious, as I recently experimented, configuring all my email inboxes on my mobile phone.
Of course, as most of you, I registed my name with all major free email services, so that someone else couldn't impersonate me, or use that name. The providers nevertheless have the bad habit of deactivating the accounts after a while...
Phone number
- I have (as most of you), a phone number at home: I hardly ever use it now, having gone for the mobile phone, and even more seldomly listen to voice mail on it. I am also using more and more VoIP services, such as those from Skype (which for the moment, as far as I understand, doesn't have an inbound number).
- I have been using the same mobile phone number for the past few years. The plan I signed up with then, might not be the most appropriate now, and I might loose my number. Fortunately European parliaments haev recently passed laws allowing consumers to retain their mobile phone numbers, although it is still cumbersome to do so.
- Now, I work a lot from the UK, and got myself another number for the UK: which one do I communicate now ? Should I put them all on my email signatures & business cards, and let people choose which number they want to use ? (it would be best to have a universal number by now, right ?)
- finally, I might want to have a professional identity, and a private identity. To some extent I can program the latest mobile phones to recognise the caller, and use different signalling mechanisms (different ringtone, pictone, etc.).
Instant Messenging
Since some of my friends and contacts are on different networks (and I really don't care where), I had to open up accounts with MSN, Y!IM, IAM, ICQ. Logging in to each network all the time is cumbersome, and each like to install software on my laptop. Fortunately, I have been using trillian on the PC to aggregate all the accounts, and AgileMessenger on my phone to aggregate them as well. Hence, my contacts can use any of my identities and get in touch with me, and I am always using a software to be able to reply.
Nevertheless, wouldn't it be easier to have just one identity?
I am facing this new challenge now as well with the IM client of Skype that is not yet aggregated into the 2 above mentionned tools...
Private signatures
Companies such as Verisign provide digital signatures allowing me to authenticate myself on the web. Nevertheless their use is not easy, not cheap, and not wide-spread.
Companies such as anonymizer have created mechanisms to make me invisible on the net, which is the opposite of what I'm looking for.
Others have created mechanisms to keep track of my contact information and publish it (Plaxo, LinkedIn...), but no one has yet tackled the issue of maintaining my digital identity right and unique.
What are your thoughts?
Update on 30/10/04: well, I just found out thru Marc Canter's blog that there is a whole industry out there trying to figure this out, and that there is even a conference this month on digital ID... maybe I should get reading some of their material and of the sponsoring corporations... So far, problem still not solved.
