Take Back Control of Your Identity from Social Networks
Tierman Ray, in his August 8 ZDNet article “Why is your identity trapped inside a social network?”, concludes with
As things stand, humans on the Internet don't really exist in cyberspace as individuals. They exist as the creation of advertising machines to monetize a manufactured identity by monopolizing information. Humans exist as phantoms, daydreams of a computer program.
He couldn’t have said it better – except we should note that it’s not just social media but the whole of what we are calling “Silibandia” that now controls not only our identities but a large and growing part of human society and culture. Social media is a subset of Silibandia: Silicon Valley plus the broadband and media industries.
And let’s not let this word “identity” constrain our perception of what we’re talking about. The subject is not just a collection of relationships and interests and beliefs and buying preferences that are attached to usernames and email addresses; rather, we’re talking about our very digital selves, the whole of our existence in the digital realm.
Sure, social media is where our digital selves become visible; we don’t see ourselves and our “friends” roaming around in the databases of our phone company and streaming provider. Silibandia is about more than social media. But social media is the part of Silibandia where we can do something to control the use of our digital selves.
According to Backlinko, “Since its inception in 1996, social media has managed to infiltrate half of the 7.7 billion people in the world. Social network platforms almost tripled their total user base in the last decade, from 970 million in 2010 to the number passing 3.81 billion users in 2020.”
(Actually, digital social media got its start with EIES/Emisari in the 1970s but let’s not get distracted by that …)
Harvard University Press, the publisher of Hans Moravec’s 1990 book Mind Children, offers a view of where this all leads: “Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us ... to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding."
“Postbiological”??
Yes, Moravec suggests that after we move ourselves – that is, our selves – completely into digits that we consider the biological residue –our bodies – to be “mere jelly.” “We” should perhaps be in quotes, because “we” doesn’t mean people as we know them. “We” become a bunch o’ bits.
In case you missed it, the publisher’s adjectives for this vision are “plausible, wonderful.”
So, the title of the book reminds us that an important duty of us parents is to prepare our children for the future, anticipating as best we can the changes they are likely to encounter as human society evolves. That is, we need to prepare our non-post-biological, flesh-and-blood children for … what now?
Well, I’ve gone far beyond what Tierman Ray suggests we should concern ourselves with, so let’s get back to the present. Let’s look at what we can do today to ensure that our digital selves remain under our control. We want privacy.
One of the points often made by The Authenticity Alliance, a group I work with, is Everyone wants privacy for themselves and everyone wants accountability from others.
So accountability is part of the same set of values. No one goes out of their way to make themselves accountable to others unless it’s the price of joining a group or community where others make themselves accountable to oneself.
We’ve Done This Before: License Plates
Among the many examples of how that works, the one we like to use involves your car. By buying a car and registering it to be driven on public roadways, we are joining an accountability community. First, we must have a driver’s license, which identifies oneself individually. Then we have a license plate, which makes us accountable for what happens as drivers or car owners on those public roadways.
But no one gets to see your driver’s license unless you show it to them. That’s typically not voluntary: if you get into an accident, you must both disclose your identities to each other. Or perhaps you need to prove your age.
So your license plate brings you into a community of Accountable Anonymity that consists of all the drivers on the road.
Duly Constituted Public Authority
But in order for that driver’s license and license plate to have any meaning, they must be issued by someone whose authority everyone in the Accountable Anonymity community agrees to. Motor vehicle departments representing a duly constituted public authority of nations, provinces, and states around the world serve that purpose. A car with Quebec license plates driven by someone with an Ontario license is welcome in Massachusetts - or probably, for that matter, here in Kenya - as they all represent duly constituted public authority. A license plate issued by Fred’s Check Cashing and Pawnshop – not so much.
When it comes to digital identities, large numbers of people are distrustful of centralized authority, usually for good reason. There’s just too much opportunity for oppressive abuse of the power that digital centralized authority represents.
On March 7, 2005, the City of Osmio was chartered at the Geneva headquarters of a United Nations agency called the International Telecommunication Union. While at some point Osmio will have a physical presence in Geneva, for now its only manifestation is as a PKI certification authority.
Two important points about Osmio:
Anyone can participate in Osmio’s governance. You are welcome to join any of Osmio’s commissions; you may get yourself elected as the moderator of a commission; and you may be elected chief moderator of the whole municipality. In order to vote on issues, you must have followed the debate leading up to the vote.
Your Digital Identity: Owned by YOU
Your identity certificate, signed by Osmio’s Vital Records Department, is owned by you. You control the use of information about yourself. In fact, no one gets to know anything about you unless they get a court order because you defrauded or defamed them, or law enforcement proves to a judge that you broke the law.
Actually, Osmio gives you multiple identity certificates, called “utility certificates.” After all, you don’t want to use the same identity with your employer that you use with a dating service. All your utility certificates are tied to one foundational certificate, which you don’t disclose to anyone but the notary who enrolled you. If you want to prove that two utility certificates are bound to the same foundational certificate, that’s up to you (you still don’t actually disclose your foundational certificate.)
Information about yourself is contained in a personal information vault called MyOwnInformation (MOI), access to which is controlled by you. Structured information in your MOI is built with Tim Berners-Lee’s system called Solid, while the unstructured parts use other parts of the PKI-Done-Right system called the Authenticity Infrastructure.
There’s much more to tell about the Authenticity Infrastructure, and I invite you to take a look at the videos at What is Authenticity.
Contrast that with Tierman’s conclusion: information has nothing much to do with the individual that you are – information is just a profile that’s used to spy on you and serve you customized ads. In other words, you don’t have much control over who you are online.
For instance, Silibandia will collect information about your location, purchases, etc., and use it to determine which posts you see on your timelines and who sees your posts. They end up influencing much of what you experience and project online. Tierman is right by calling it a “manufactured identity”.
Instead of you identifying yourself, Silibandia profiles you and manufactures for you an identity that best serves their interests. It’s not a secret that Silibandia has eroded everyone’s privacy. If you don’t control the use of information that identifies you, then you can’t have privacy.
Tierman Says;
A larger implication is privacy. Every user of a social network signs on to give vast control over personal information to social media, with potentially disastrous consequences, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There is no lever by which an individual can negotiate with social media companies for what they would like as the treatment of their information — precisely because within a social network, a person's information belongs not to them, but to the operator of that private database.
That last line clearly illustrates where the problem is. You do not own the information about you that is stored in Facebook’s et al. databases.
Is the Internet Broken?
Further down in the article, Tierman seems to suggest that solving the social networking problem would mean overhauling internet infrastructure.
He quotes Leonard Kleinrock, one of the inventors of the internet, who implied that we need to change the internet infrastructure in one of his forums. Kleinrock thinks it is difficult to do so, now that the internet has already established certain usage patterns into the said infrastructure.
"It's really hard, when you have billions of people out there, to change a) their behavior; or b) the rules by which they operate or the protocols they use," — Kleinrock
Kleinrock’s observation sounds like the MIT Technology Review cover story 16 years ago proclaiming “The Internet is Broken.”
Is the internet really broken? I don’t think so!
Let’s step back a moment and ask, What is the internet?
The internet was originally characterized as an information highway, and that name still fits. So, what is a highway?
A highway is an outdoor public transport system, right? Going back to our car metaphor, what goes on in your little vehicle is your own business, but typically we use highways to go from one building to another. One indoor space to another.
What This Highway Needs: BUILDINGS
The highway does its job well, transporting our packet-vehicles from one place to another with great speed and efficiency, but … where are the buildings?
What is a building? Sure, it’s a shell that keeps the rain off our heads, but is that really what a building is about?
More significantly, a building is a set of accountability spaces. It’s about rooms and suites and residences that are designated for particular people and particular uses. You tend to know who is in a room with you in a building. You tend to keep files in a controlled space with controlled access.
Again, where are the digital buildings?
Douglas Crockford is famous for, among other things, his pronouncement to “never trust the browser.” A browser is an outdoor billboard. The Web is a set of outdoor billboards. We’re doing our banking on a billboard! Whose idea was that?!
Where are the digital buildings?
The answer is that secure indoor spaces do not support Silibandia’s business model, which is all about capturing information that we spew out in public in our travels on the highway. And so Silibandia has trained us not to ask for secure indoor spaces.
We have a wonderful set of digital construction materials with which to construct secure indoor spaces. It’s called PKI, and it’s been proven over the decades of its existence.
Of course, a pile of construction materials is not a building. We need all sorts of methods and procedures and standards for ensuring that a building is, in fact, habitable.
We’ve Done This Before: The Occupancy Permit
Here again, we already have something that sums up those methods and procedures and standards for ensuring that a building is, in fact, habitable. It’s all summed up in the wonderful thing called the occupancy permit.
The occupancy permit attests that a specific architect, a specific general contractor, and a specific building inspector each have put their professional licenses – their reputations and their very livelihoods – on the line by attesting that the building meets code, that there are no secret passageways that don’t show up on the drawings, and that the building is indeed habitable.
Oh, and it only stands to reason that they have been paid, and paid well, for their services. If they haven’t, well, that occupancy permit will just have to wait.
(If you’re a code auditor – that is, a building inspector – I suggest that you help us bring about a future that will bring you a seven-figure income.)
Who’s On First?
So the problem isn’t the highway – that is, the internet. The problem is how we use the internet. Silibandia’s control over our information is a result of our inability to establish and own our identities online. For you to exist online, you must create a profile on a Silibandia platform and whatever information you put on it, they own it.
And the worst part is, they don’t really care whether you are really who you say you are. If someone manufactures a persona then that persona becomes a valid participant in the digital society. What happens if you end up relying on that new fake human being, the “person” who can be erased at the whim of the person who created it? Imagine if the bank where you keep your money has a bunch of these:
So accountability is important. We rely on the claimed identities of others all the time. But doesn’t a reliable identity credential, a “digital me” make us all trackable in exactly the way Silibandia has? We really need to be anonymous and yet at the same time accountable. Is it possible to have anonymity and accountability at the same time?
The license plate system I’ve discussed above keeps drivers accountable, but also maintains their privacy.
Tierman proposes that there should be personal protocols instead of just having internet protocols. He believes that would prevent the hoarding of our personal information by Silibandia:
A personal protocol, like every other protocol on the Internet, could allow for multiple different social graphs and interest graphs. Each one would have to solicit the interest of users and bargain for their information. By definition, those users' information would be portable, since it would belong to them, not to a database. That would allow movement between social networks, which could result in greater diversity and greater connectedness of individuals.
He goes on to question whether that can be done at this time given that Silibandia has gained a lot of momentum.
First, his proposed solution solves part of the problem but not the entire problem. I mentioned above that Silibandia does not really care about real identities. That simply means anyone can masquerade as you on their platforms. That’s called INAUTHENTICITY and it further illustrates the fact that you have no control over your identity in Silibandia’s world.
The license plate system ensures no one can use your license to masquerade as you. If it happens that two cars have similar license plates, there is a straightforward way of identifying the fake. The system solves both the problem of inauthenticity and privacy. If you are AUTHENTIC, then you are accountable.
A Rock-Solid Construction Material: PKI
The solution to these problems has been hiding in plain sight all along. What we need are DIGITAL IDENTITY CERTIFICATES. Digital identity certificates are part of the world’s best digital construction material: PKI (we call it the Puzzle Kit Infrastructure).
Watch this two-minute video to learn what is PKI and the amazing possibilities it brings along.
Tierman questioned whether we can have personal protocols for establishing and owning our identities right now. Well, the PKI technology has been around for decades but has never been fully implemented. Now we can implement it. We can all start using digital identity certificates to authenticate ourselves online and establish control over who has access to our information.
Visit What is Authenticity to learn more about how we can make a whole new world of authenticity and privacy possible.