A Question of Identity

Within the IT world where I spend my working life, identity is one of the main structural questions for any new system, how do know who is accessing the information. So we use tokens (user names, passwords) or physical devices, known in IT circles as two-factor authentication but better known as Chip & Pin. Something you have and something only you could know.

Over time I have acquired more and more of these, my work login, my home login, my bank card and pin, various usernames and passwords for a myriad of websites and services that I use, and we all start to come to the same conclusion why can’t we just have 1 identity, after all there is just one ME. Ultimately it comes down to trust, or the lack there of, none of these providers of service want’s to trust anyone else to identify the end person as if they get it wrong it would be the provider not the authenticator that would suffer the loss or bad publicity. This is starting to change as smaller websites decide to abdicate this authentication to Facebook and Twitter as these mega-sites become the centre of our online world. And it was really the identity on these social network sites that I actually wanted to write about.

You see this is the first post on this blog and being polite I wanted to introduce myself, but then I started to realize that on the internet I have morphed from being a single individual into a multitude of variants of myself. I have signed up at lots of different sites, some of which want to know something about ME, but the me they care about depends on the site in question, as old fashioned forums style sites are dedicated to a single scope of interest, so really they normally only want to know about my views and opinions on that subject.

But then we get back to the mega-sites, should I have multiple twitter feeds that spout about single subjects, as the majority of tweeters that I follow seem to, or have a single complex feed that flits between the many facets of my personality. Should I join up my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter worlds into a “THIS IS ME” or keep the worlds they encompass separate for friends, colleagues and the world at large. Again this comes down to trust and openness, do I want work colleagues (or potential employers to know about my social life, even as a 40 year old it is quite boring but maybe a little obsessive.
Does this show a rounded individual or someone who is not totally committed to the cause? What ever the cause should be?