This A1 article in the Journal today, looking at the way the Whole Foods CEO manufactured an online identity to post comments about competition was a great into to the session regarding identity here at iMeme.
The panel was made up of:
Kim Cameron, Architect of Identity and Access, Microsoft
Louise Guay, President, My Virtual Model
Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
Harriet Pearson, Vice President, Regulatory Policy, and Chief Privacy Officer, IBM
Paul Trevthick, CEO and Co-founder, Parity Communications, Inc.
There was a great discussion about both the challenges and opportunity to finding a way to better aproximate the concept of identity online. Everyone agrees on the challenge --- how to find a way to allow people to identify themselves online in a way that protects privacy, promotes commerce and increases trust in the online world. There was no consensus on what the solution might be, although Kim Cameron and Paul Trevthick are both working on applications to foster all of the above.
In response to a question from the audience about how to avoid identity spoofing (me pretending to be Steve Jobs online, for example). It's a tough problem. Chris Kelly from Facebook had the best answer -- you could do this for a short time in Facebook, but because of the social connection on the site, it's much harder to sustain fraud.
In a small way, this is the same set of challenges we see with anonymous comments on blogs or (in the case of the Whole Foods CEO) on message boards. Anonymity can be good, but it can also free people from what we might consider norms of behavior that exist in the rest of the world. I was talking to Kim Cameron after the panel, and my point was that it's taken us, as humans, thousands of years to figure out identity in the real world, and we still often get it wrong. It's not reasonable to think we'd figure it out in the whole two decades or so we've been playing in online worlds. So, it's going to get worse before it gets better!