The Department of Psychology at the University of Texas published a study that found that Facebook users are no different online than they are offline.

"Manifestations of Personality in Online Social Networks: Self-Reported Facebook-Related Behaviors and Observable Profile Information" published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Unsurprisingly the study revealed strong connections between real personality and online-related behaviour.

Professor Samuel D. Gosling and his colleagues found that self-reported personality traits are accurately reflected in online social networks such as Facebook by looking at the big five personality traits - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

There are two studies covered in the paper

Study 1

Researchers examined personality and self-reported Facebook-related behaviors. The study drew 159 participants from a psychology student study pool at Washington University in St. Louis; 68% were female. Of those who shared their ethnicity, the numbers boiled down to 7% African-American, 18% Asian, 68% white or Caucasian and 6% other. Study subjects were assessed using the Ten Item Personality Inventory and 11-item self-reported Facebook-specific activities.

Extroverted Facebook users reported the most friends and highest engagement levels. Conscientious types, who are characterized as disciplined, organized and achievement-oriented, reported the least Facebook usage across the board. Overall, extroverts tended to engage more than introverts.

Facebook might not be a real-world coffee shop or a bar, spaces where real-life social interaction occur, but it certainly is a space where extraverts seek out virtual social engagement.

Study 2

Personality and Observable Information on Facebook Profiles, "researchers examined whether objectively assessed observable information found on Facebook profiles was associated with personality traits. One-hundred and thirty-three people from the University of Texas at Austin received $10 compensation, were entered into a lottery to win $100 in exchange and received partial fulfillment of course requirements if they were already enrolled in Introductory Psychology. The participants signed up via the Web; they did not know that this study was about Facebook. Of participants, 61% were female. Forty-two percent were Asian, Asian-American, Indian or Pacific-Islander; 53% Caucasian or white; 13% Hispanic or Latino/a; 9% black or African-American and 2% other.

The researchers saved the Facebook profiles of participants after they signed up so that participants would not be able to alter anything before the research officially began. After that, nine undergraduate research assistants (five female, four male) rated the personality of the 133 participants based only on their Facebook profiles. If the observers realized that they already knew one of the participants in an offline context, their ratings were not used.

Individual Facebook profiles were coded with eight types of information: number of photos, number of photo albums (some were user-generated wall photos, others thematic), number of words in the free-response "about me" section, number of wall posts, number of groups, number of friends in local network based on region or organization, total number of friends, number of networks (groups linked by a common region or organization). The researchers found a number of links between observable information on Facebook profiles and the users' actual personalities….. Extraversion was correlated with the number of friends overall and the number of friends in the local network. These personality types seek out virtual social contact and were more engaged in online social experience than introverts.

The other dimension associated with information was openness, which correlated with number of friends in both local and total networks. The researchers did not discover a correlation between conscientiousness or agreeableness and observable profile information. Openness was expressed through exploring new activities, meeting people and changing the visual scenery. Neuroticism was not easy readable on Facebook; researchers found it difficult to judge by outside observers, especially in relation to more observable traits like extroversion. The study also found that low-conscientious procrastinators used Facebook as a way to avoid doing actual work.

The study determined that online social networks are not an escape from reality, but rather a microcosm of peoples' larger social worlds and an extension of offline behaviors.

Tomorrow (Wednesday 18^th Jan 2012)  Wikipedia will black out, friends will not Tweet and I am sure other activities will occur to protest for Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US.

This post is not about why I support but more of a reflection about action.  I have never been able to strike or stop work as I have been self employed or in growth companies for just about my entire working career. But I now have the choice to make my view known.  Many of us watched in awe as several counties used the Internet to bring about regime change and have enjoyed free services in exchange for our data and advertising.

It feels good that we can now raise a peaceful protest and have a voice, but how did we get to this point?  I am left wondering how it is that the US even got as far as they did with the proposals and who’s voice is the true voice Government listens to until we protest.  Why is it that we protest late and not early?

Within the EU we are facing the same issue with policy and proposals being introduced from Viviane Reading that appear to be backed by those who have an old model to protect and want the state (law) to do something that the senior execs failed to do.

Issues that we should be engaged in include: Tracking, Nymwars, security, location, GPS, privacy, DoNot Track, Government Data, storage and protection of data, citizenship, rights and access to name a few.  If only there was enough time….

Therefore, I can see someone coming up with a new CAPTCHA style idea, See this TED talk, where at the joining stage of a service ( or usage) we get to voice a vote about something – massive scale online collaboration to bring about change rather than a day of protest a continual stream of consciousness from the voter? 

Image source http://indigo-moogle.deviantart.com/art/Digital-Identity-127846683

Deloitte’s pick: rather a narrow definition by using ID for authentication is only one aspect of Digital Identity…..

(Re)Emerging Enablers:

• Geo-spatial Visualization: Within the world of visualization, geospatial takes advantage of an explosion of geographical, location-aware data. Sources feeding this growth include new semi-structured data from mobile devices, geo-tagging of existing enterprise structured data and tapping into new streams of location-aware unstructured data.
• Digital Identities: The digital expression of identity is growing more complex every day. Digital identities should be unique, verifiable, able to be federated and non-repudiable. As individuals take a more active hand in managing their own digital identities, organizations are attempting to create single digital identities that retain the appropriate context across the range of credentials that an individual carries. Digital persona protection is becoming a strong area of cyber focus.
• Data Goes to Work: Organizations are finding ways to turn the explosion in size, volume and complexity of data into insight and value. This is occurring across structured and unstructured content from internal and external sources. This is expected to complement but not replace long-standing information management programs and investments in data warehouses, business intelligence suites, reporting platforms and relational database experience.
• Measured Innovation: CIOs can help facilitate the discovery of the next wave of true disruption--and continuously improve the business of IT and the business of the business. Measured innovation offers an approach to managing both disciplines by providing a pragmatic way to identify, evaluate and launch potential innovations with a focus on aligning opportunities to areas that can fuel disruption and create measurable, attributable value.
• Outside-in Architecture: Flexibility in operating and business models is proving more important. As a result, need to share is colliding with need to know and shifting solution architectures away from a siloed, enterprise-out design pattern and into an outside-in approach to delivering business through rapidly evolving ecosystems.

Disruptive Deployments:

• Social Business: The emergence of boomers as digital natives and the rise of social media in daily life have paved the way for social business in the enterprise. This is leading organizations to apply social technologies on social networks, amplified by social media, to fundamentally reshape how business gets done. Some of the initial successful use cases are consumer-centric, but business value is available – and should be realized – across the enterprise.
• Hyper-hybrid Cloud: Cloud-based and cloud-aware integration offerings are expected to continue to evolve, and many organizations face a hybrid reality with a mix of on-premise solutions and multiple cloud offerings. The challenge becomes integration, identity management and data translation between the core and multitenant public cloud offerings, and offering lightweight orchestration for processes traversing enterprise and cloud assets.
• Enterprise Mobility Unleashed: Mobility is helping many organizations rethink their business models. Consumer-facing mobile applications are only the beginning. With the explosion of mobile use cases, organizations should make sure solutions are enterprise class – secure, reliable, maintainable and integrated to critical back-office systems and data.
• Gamification: Serious gaming simulations and game mechanics such as leaderboards, achievements and skill-based learning are becoming embedded in day-to-day business processes, driving adoption, performance and engagement.
• User Empowerment: User engagement remains a key doctrine for enterprise IT with consumerization setting expectations for solutions built from the user-down, not the system-up. Compounding the need, IT is becoming increasingly democratized, with empowered end-users able to directly source solutions from the cloud or app stores – on a mobile device and increasingly on the desktop.

Source : http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/press/Press-Releases/806b17a15fc14310VgnVCM3000001c56f00aRCRD.htm

On SSRN: The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information

by Paul Schwartz University of California, Berkeley – School of Law, and Daniel Solove, George Washington University Law School

Abstract: Personally identifiable information (PII) is one of the most central concepts in information privacy regulation. The scope of privacy laws typically turns on whether PII is involved. The basic assumption behind the applicable laws is that if PII is not involved, then there can be no privacy harm. At the same time, there is no uniform definition of PII in information privacy law.

Moreover, computer science has shown that in many circumstances non-PII can be linked to individuals, and that de-identified data can be re-identified. PII and non-PII are thus not immutable categories, and there is a risk that information deemed non-PII at one time can be transformed into PII at a later juncture. Due to the malleable nature of what constitutes PII, some commentators have even suggested that PII be abandoned as the mechanism by which to define the boundaries of privacy law.

In this Article, we argue that although the current approaches to PII are flawed, the concept of PII should not be abandoned. We develop a new approach called “PII 2.0,” which accounts for PII’s malleability. Based upon a standard rather than a rule, PII 2.0 utilizes a continuum of risk of identification. PII 2.0 regulates information that relates to either an “identified” or “identifiable” individual, and it establishes different requirements for each category. To illustrate this theory, we use the example of regulating behavioral marketing to adults and children. We show how existing approaches to PII impede the effective regulation of behavioral marketing, and how PII 2.0 would resolve these problems.

full text of the article, The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information by Paul Schwartz, Daniel Solove :: SSRN.

This was a project I worked on for SWIFT*, lead internally by Peter Van Auwera  along with the Identity Gang: Gary Thompson, Doc Searls, Kaliya Hamlin, Drummond Reed, Andreas Weigend, Craig Burton, Mary Hodder, Don Thibeau, Scott David, and Peter Hinssen.

*SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications and is a global organization that each day handles financial transactions such as wire transfers for more than 9,000 banks, is preparing an expansion into data banking – helping to secure all types of digital exchanges.

The question: Can SWIFT succeed in doing what Microsoft and other tech titans famously failed to achieve and build something that is useful in the identity space? Microsoft tried to introduce something similar 10 years ago with its Passport and Hailstorm initiatives; Intel, Sun, Oracle and AOL attempted to develop such a service through a group called The Liberty Alliance

Background: Data is becoming a new type of raw material, on a par with capital and labour, according to a 2011 World Economic Forum report, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class. Some of the largest Internet companies, including Google and Facebook reap most of the profits from collecting, aggregating, analyzing and monetizing personal data. Consumers have no control and little knowledge of what is being done with their data.

Scenario: It is desirable to put control and dissemination of personal data “back” into the hands of the individual. The idea is each person’s data would reside in an account where it would be controlled, traded and accounted for – much like a bank account. The services would be interoperable so that the data could be exchanged with other institutions and individuals globally. Users might even leverage their data in the same way money is leveraged for credit.

Trust: The WEF report says, “an essential requirement would be for the services to operate over a technical and legal infrastructure that is highly trusted.” That is where SWIFT comes in. It is a neutral organization that already operates a secure global network with an established legal framework, placing it in pole position to facilitate access to secure personal-data services.  SWIFT has a closed, highly reliable and secure network for interchange of money between the banks. The vision is that you could take that underlying infrastructure and make it more open and more interchangeable, and make it work between any entities.

The Proposal:  build a Digital Asset Grid as per the diagram. The arrows represent the new proposed SWIFT infrastructure service. This infrastructure would provide trusted and certified pointers to digital asset content and associated digital asset usage rights. An ecosystem of banks and other parties would build Digital Asset Services (blue boxes) that leverage this trusted infrastructure service. Users interact with the blue services and the underlying infrastructure via the selector and the weaver. The SELECTOR is a secure mechanism to manage the flow of claims. The WEAVER allows the “weaving” of digital assets with digital rights and the entities that receive those rights. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 [The weaving concept was originally introduced at SIBOS in 2010: that talk can be heard here by Gary Thompson]

The Vision: The Digital Asset Grid is to move the SWIFT network and SWIFT services from a closed, single-purpose, and messaging-based system to an open, general-purpose, API-based system.

Next Steps: building a prototype in 2012 and finding a dance partner!

The web (if represented as a collection of pages) is based on some simple request-response mechanisms. I request a page and the server responds and gives me the page. End of that transaction. With the “dataweb” – a collection of Digital Assets and associated usage rights; there is a need for something where exchanging entities can perform a dance around and with the Digital Assets. And we want to be sure that they are who they say they are, and that they have the right usage rights to the digital assets. So we move from a two dimensional view of the world (in computer terms a “table”) to a multi-dimensional view (in computer terms a “graph”)

One of the many use cases for the Digital Asset Grid would be to solve compliance, Instead of moving messages from A to B, we keep the DATA where it originates and “point” to them with SWIFT certified pointers to where the data are located and the associated usage rights.

The dance protocol (full duplex) for this use case, from opening of the dance with (a “webhook” in technical terms), to the actual picking-up of the content, and closing the dance and everything in-between, could look like something like this:

·          PartyA: “hey, I am sending a signal that I wanna dance the tango (slang for payment instructions) with any party in the Swift dance hall at 9pm”

·          PartyB: “yep, I wanna dance with you, let’s meet in the SWIFT dance hall at the bar”

·          PartyA: “ok, here we are, cool place

·          PartyA: “Let’s get to business”

·          PartyA: “I just gave you following rights my payment instructions at this XRI: you have XDI pick-up rights”

·          PartyB: “ok, gotja. Will pick it up right away”

·          PartyB: “knock knock, I am coming to fetch those payment instructions”

·          PartyA: “let’s check if you have the usage rights….”

·          PartyA: “everything looks fine, go ahead”

·          PartyB: “loading, loading, loading…”

·          PartyB: “Ok I am done”

·          PartyA: “So am I”

·          PartyB: “tomorrow, same place same time to dance ?”

·          PartyA: “would love to

·          PartyB: “sure, bye bye”

·          PartyA: “bye bye”

I really enjoyed contributing to this project and it is a joy to work with a company that is open about innovation, the output and looking to engage at an early stage with the widest possible community. Well done @petervan and Kosta (@copernicc)

Drawing by Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid)

Orwellian utopia theory:  Google, Amazon, Apple will take over the entire world, control everything and the free market will end.

Let's imagine that :

• Nike, Sony, Ford, Samsung, AT&T, Vodafone, Paypal, HP, Visa, Coke, Nestle, BA, Intel, Microsoft, Telefonica, Band of America, Chase, Philips, Marks and Spencer, Ebay, Pepsi, Tesco, Walmat, Real Madrid, Hilton, Amex, McAfee, Oracle, Disney, Hello, News Corp, Levi, Toyota will still be valuable and credible brands who have a close relationship with customers.
• Value and supply chains will be more complex but efficient as anyone can offer terms for products and services to anyone
• Telecoms, Banking and Media are fighting a rear guard action on business models and relevancy in the value chain
• Customers can decide but there is not perfect knowledge
• Local is as important as national/ global
• Detailed insightful, explicit and knowledge about a customer is business critical
• Identity provision will become a highly regulated business with significant penalties brand and cost issues for failure
• Identity will resemble the security, access control and authentication market structures and dynamics
• Regulated market Innovation is slow, complex and costly..... innovation using "identity" is fast, dynamic and fun
• Paying for products and services is still the bed rock of a stable economic platform
• Speed of data be approaching real-time

Therefore could be possible for several other players to partner and take a leadership position

1. Telco and Bank as an identity provider
2. Brand and Bank as trusted party
3. IT company and Telco as end to end secure provider
4. Retail and Utility company as data store

Ignoring the issues of culture, business models, margin erosion, regulation, valuation, brand value, trust, free cash flow, shareholder expectation and CEO persona; is there enough left (of either business) to protect (from a partnership) or has so much already been eroded that they cannot get back……and therefore it is about building something new?

Further comments to the post of facial recognition earlier today http://blog.mydigitalfootprint.com/facial-recognition-is-it-part-of-my-digital-f

And other comments on the blog here http://blog.mydigitalfootprint.com/?sort=&search=facial

So the short version is that you can take a picture of someone, use the image to search images on say Facebook, match the two images using some sort of facial recognition algorithm and therefore find out someone's name (given the match and the different database entries).  This would apply even for someone just walking down the street, or tracking them where they walked, find you where they live and any other data.... shock.  It simple terms it is allowing databases to be paired to create value or make it really creepy.

Test cases prove it all works but they use data that was "selective" to make it quicker, but the reality is here and these services will be rolled out and you will be identified without being asked from your ID, which for some is the issue. “I want to hide”

As we realise and struggle with the fact that democracy entitles everyone who has a voice to be counted (freedom of expression), so we also realise that certain digital technology makes it harder to do harm.

Mr Policeman stops you;  "diving licence please" even for the trained eye and a data base detecting the forgery is hard but has real costs for Joe Public. However with the shoulder strap videocam the true person ID comes back allowing the  police to do his/ her job.  Where else can this tech be used that we would see value - Identification of people in a disaster, being identified as a VIP at your bank (assuming longevity of jobs has gone); criminal activity, names of guests, boarder control....

So all criminals will work this out and have ID photos on Facebook etc that are not them but similar enough to fool the algorithm or they wear a few facial extras, which makes them easy to identify!? 

But I still have the same question – who’s data is it?

http://dickhardt.org/

The annual report provides (Dec 2011) an overview of progress on the actions of the Digital Agenda for Europe, updating the list of completed actions since the Digital Agenda Scoreboard in May 2011, and outlining the work ahead. This document is part of the efforts of the European Commission on the implementation and governance of the Digital Agenda, further to other activities in 2011 including the Digital Agenda Scoreboard, the Digital Agenda Assembly, and the Digital Agenda Going Local. The overall aim of the Digital Agenda is to deliver sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single market based on fast and ultra fast internet and interoperable applications. The Digital Agenda is a key component of the Europe 2020 strategy to provide growth and jobs in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/digital-identity/

Free PDF download of the book is here http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/digital-identity/Digital_Identity_Ebook.pdf

A new legal concept of identity

"In today's digital environment the concept of identity is an issue of much greater complexity than it was in the days of the offline world. Our digital identity can exist in many forms and for many different purposes. Its existence on the Web becomes a currency that can be unscrupulously traded and abused.

It has never been more important to protect the concept of "who we are". We are at the beginning of a new discipline of Web Science in which such issues need to be researched across disciplines. This text offers an excellent starting point for work in this area."

Professor Stephen Saxby,
School of Law,

University of Southampton

This is a study of digital identity in a transactional context, from a legal perspective.  

Clare Sullivan's analysis reveals the emergence of a distinct, new legal concept of identity. This concept is particularly clear under a national identity scheme such as the United Kingdom and Indian schemes. However, its emergence is evident even in jurisdictions, like Australia, which do not have a formal national identity scheme. Much of the analysis can also be extrapolated to proprietary schemes such as those run by banks and other businesses.

An individual’s digital identity which is used for transactional purposes has crucial functions which give it legal personality. The author argues that an individual’s digital identity also has the characteristics of property which can, and should, be legally protected. Identity theft is defined using the emergent concept and the study shows that digital identity is property which capable of actually being stolen and criminally damaged.

The study examines the emergence of attendant legal rights and duties including a new right to digital identity and its legal protection.  Dr Sullivan argues that an individual has the right to an accurate, functional digital identity and shows that this right exists in addition to the right to privacy.

Dr Sullivan maintains that, considering the essentially public nature of identity, the right to identity provides better, and more appropriate, protection than is afforded by the right to privacy. She asserts that the importance of the right to identity in this context has been obscured by the focus on privacy in international legal scholarship and jurisprudence.

The functions and legal nature of digital identity are analysed using real examples which highlight the implications for individuals, businesses and government. The findings have the potential to fundamentally change the way digital identity is legally and commercially regarded.