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Managing digital identity information
Abstract
A basic architecture for managing digital identity information in a network such as the World Wide Web is provided. A user of the architecture can organize his or her information into one or more profiles which reflect the nature of different relationships between the user and other entities, and grant or deny each entity access to a given profile. Various enhancements which may be provided through the architecture are also described, including tools for filtering email, controlling access to user web pages, locating other users and making one's own location known, browsing or mailing anonymously, filling in web forms automatically with information already provided once by hand, logging in automatically, securely logging in to multiple sites with a single password and doing so from any machine on the network, and other enhancements.
Increasingly, the lines of our lives are prescribed, mediated, drawn and knotted together by digital technologies. It has been argued that ‘digital footprints’, as a trail of user data points collected from online communities and networks, can assist in better understanding human behaviour and social interaction, initially focused on mainly real-time and retrospective analysis. In our attempts at sense-making of togetherness in a COVID-19/post-COVID-19 world, we believe it may be an oversimplification to conceptualise our daily data trails as ‘digital footprints’. The nature of our interaction with these technologies as well as their interaction with us have changed deeply ever since the rapid growth of digital connectivity. The character of these symbiotic relationships has been accentuated even more by our global experience of ‘connected disconnection’ during the pandemic’s lockdowns. Against this background, we expand the concept of ‘geno-digital spores’ as a more appropriate metaphor for the manner within which data and technology combine in new ways to create (or fracture) lines of togetherness.
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