alexlockwood.net

Controlling your digital identity

Reading one of my regular neuroscience blogs and I picked up this story about QDOS, a site still in pre-register beta status, but which aims to give you “a starting point for managing and taking control of your online status. Be seen how you want to be seen.”

The premise is that consumers (i.e. users) should be more in control of their data, but in the world of Facebook and its ‘you can never leave’ mantra, we need to go further than this, and that users should have more say in their digital identity: how others see us; how others make us seen (do I really have 157 ‘friends’? The language is critical here). That’s based on some research they did:

Recent research has shown that more and more Brits are making decisions based on digital status. Already 16% have chosen their new home based on how their prospective neighbours appear online. 1 in 5 (20%) have researched a prospective boss online before accepting a job and 32% have searched online to find out more about trades people and professionals, from plumbers to lawyers, before hiring them to do a job.

I say research ‘they’ did. Who are they? Well, they are owned/a project of Garlick, the founders of online bank Egg. They call themselves ‘the identity experts’ and they are advised by people of the calibre of Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the internet whole, and Simon Davies at the London School of Economics, heavily involved with assessing the identity card debate. They see reputation and identity as important professional and personal ‘valuables’ that are viewed and perceived online as well as offline, and it is important that we try to control online how ‘real world decisions [are] made about us’.

Look further (and thank you Garlick for being so transparent) they are funded by two venture capital firms, 3i and DoughtyHanson & Co, who specialise in technology capital.

Certainly digital identity is important: employers and teachers are looking online to monitor the activities of their students and employees. Reputations are made and broken, or at least debated and influenced (see last post).

I’d like to see some analysis of QDOS’s role in the management of people’s identity, or whether the site is another name-game roundabout to capture audience share; is it a marketing tool for Egg? Probably not with the type of people invovled–it comes back to trust of individuals and their reputation, of course, after all I don’t ‘know’ Berners-Lee–but I’ll keep an eye on this, and think it would be a good case study for any Ownership and Control (MAC241) students to take up.