I've been thinking about getting an OpenID. In fact, I've been thinking about getting several. A number of ideas occurred to me as I was gaming online where certain people know me, and know me well as a gamer, but have no idea of who I am in real life.
Positive Doe
The first kind of identity that I considered, I actually have before but I cannot recall the context. Anyway, one of the gamers happened to be Canadian and complained about how much money illegal aliens can get in the form of some social benefits. How do you prove that you are an illegal alien? I mean if I were trying to scam the Canadian health care system as an illegal alien what would they expect of me, to hand over my American ID or my Sudanese ID? Should I simply refuse to speak English and babble in some African-like tribal pseudo-language with a co-conspiratorial 'translator'? It seems to me that there's a big hole in any number of agencies that are specifically funded to keep track of, or ascribe identity, infer identity or otherwise legitimate people who have no papers.
The funny thing is that I can still recall my trip to Axciom in Arkansas many years ago where I was first informed that there are not two but 11 genders in their database. Imputation is an art.
Classes of Identity
The real interesting point about generating multiple IDs is that some should always be, some might be and some should never be attributable to your self. For all intents and purposes, let's call your 'self' as your bodily person where your soul lives - that is the thing that dies when you die. Your identity is a possession. I think, as I said before, that you should have many identities, like keys on a ring, like credit cards in your wallet, like shoes in your closet. The right ID for the right purpose.
If you think of an identity as a suit of clothing, then obviously there are times when you would like to be anonymous. You should be able to wear sunglasses and hats and common clothes so as not to stand out in a crowd. But that's not really a deniable you.
I think of IDs in a few different dimensions of anonymity. Deniability, Traceability, Selfishness. These three make up a rubric into which I would have classes of IDs according to their purpose.
Deniability is the extent to which you can claim that an ID is not you. For example, I can publish a comment at somebody's blog and leave give a false name, forget about the comment and two years later have someone accuse me of authorship. When the name is 'anonymous' I could clearly and credibly say, that could be anyone. This would be less credible if I had published the comment as Joe Cubegeek.
Traceability is the extent to which someone could prove that I had access to the incident in question. I may not even know what my IP address is or the route through which my message was posted. However forensically, someone might be able to trace the message to my house, or someplace it could be reasonably proven that I would be.
Selfishness is the extent to which the content of the comment is similar to my style or attributable to my interests. I might use a completely deniable name, and access a site through an untraceable method, but if the comment is about the nature of my wife's cooking, it stands to reason that I might have something to do with it.
In setting up legends / avatars / identities, these are the kinds of issues I would consider for defending.
For example. In my online gaming, I am known as 'sixoseven'. This is not a primary ID but a somewhat frivolous one. I wouldn't mind if other people knew that sixoseven ties to my self. But in the context of my gaming actions, I think it would have a fairly low traceability to the other gamers. It has high selfishness because I only use it for the games I play, and I use my voice in many of those games, and people could recognize my voice. It has a fair amount of deniability because there's no reason to think that 'sixoseven' is me.
So I might set up a number of IDs, the first would be Class A, which I always want attributable to me. Therefore I might not care about traceability or selfishness. I want people to know it is me and nobody else. This might be something like my national ID, my passport, my driver's license.
Another might be Class X, under which I might acquire contraband under false pretenses and would want perfect deniability.
Another might be Class E, under which I receive privileged information in which deniability is desired bu not necessary, although traceability should be very low.
These are all ways I would think about classifying IDs in the context of anonymity given the opportunity to assume many identities for different purposes.
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