I was interviewed by Gareth Mitchell last week about OpenID for the BBC’s Digital Planet podcast.
Our conversation lasted about 10 minutes — of which only about two minutes survived (mirrored here as they currently do not keep an archive of previous episodes).
It was a familiar conversation for me, since the primary concerns Gareth expressed had to do with privacy, identity and the notion that “someone else” could “own” another’s identity on the web. His premise sounded familiar: “Won’t OpenID make my identity more hackable?”
The answer, of course, isn’t that straight-forward, and depends on a lot of mitigating factors. However, the fundamental take-away is that OpenID really is no more insecure than email, and even then, provides a future-facing design that that leads to many kinds of protection that email, in practice, does not.
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I’ve also noticed over the past several years that Europeans harbor much greater sensitivities to privacy issues while Americans tend to concentrate on matters concerning “property” (physical, personal and intellectual). This is evidenced by yesterday’s blow up around Facebook’s changes to their Terms of Service. On the one hand, there’s this weird American outcry against Facebook owning your data (in common, at least) forever. From the European side, it seems like the concern is centered more around what the changes mean to one’s privacy, rather than whether Facebook can perpetually “make money” off your stuff.
I bring this up because it’s immensely relevant with regards to the conversation I had with Gareth (given that he’s based in the UK).
With the current case, I’m sympathetic to Facebook, because I know that this will be the year that people have their “mindframes” bent around new conceptions of personal privacy and control and ownership of data. I believe (as Facebook purports to) that people’s desire to share will overcome their desire for control over their personal data, and that they will gradually realize that sharing will require letting go. It is this reality — the reality of networked data in the cloud — that necessitated Facebook’s change to their terms of service — not some nefarious desire to steal your first born (or your data).
In other words, the conditions and kind of thinking that lead to the backlash against Plaxo known as Scoblegate will cease to exist in the future. Facebook’s change is merely a recognition of this new environment.
It remains unclear to me whether the pundits in this space realize that this shift will occur, and will occur naturally (as it has already begun — consider the integration of Facebook and Flickr in iPhoto ’09), or whether they just want to scream and holler when they notice something that seems astray.
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Last December, I spent time talking to Boaz Sender of HTML Times at length about several of these topics (including discussing the intellectual property issues surrounding many of the technologies that are helping to ensure that the web remain an open playing field) in an interview about Identity in the Network. In juxtaposition to my interview with the BBC, I think this interview gets into some of the deeper issues at work here that must also be considered when it comes to the future of online identity, privacy and data control and (co)-ownership.
Factory Joe 