WHO AM I?

Q. What do I, a Michigan musician and an American elementary school have in common?

A. We are all William Yates!

I found out all this information simply through a Google search. I went in expecting to find at least something other than information about me, but I ended up with about six and a half million hits. That's a little scary. I, like any other person, want to know that I am an individual with an identity. But where does my online identity stop and my offline identity begin?

Here are some fairly uninteresting things about me: I go to St Paul's School, I have blond hair, I cycle to school most mornings. However, this is only part of my offline identity. If you really wanted to you could, with the internet, find out my discipline record throughout school, my political views, my full date of birth, my parents' salaries, my teachers' Facebook passwords and goodness only knows what else. The amount of personal information available through the web is terrifying.

It isn't only the internet. There are devices we use every day that record information about our spending habits, our whereabouts, who we contact. For example: some time ago my dad had to be airlifted off a ski slope because of an injury at considerable personal expense. Within about 36 hours his bank had phoned him to ask what had cost so much. The Problem is that with so much financial information on the internet, it is becoming more common to see people trying to steal your identity and use bank details and the like to their advantage - identity theft. Your Oyster card keeps track of where you are - if that information fell into the wrong hands, think of the trouble it could cause. The Metropolitan Police requested information about specific Oyster card whereabouts 436 times between August 2004 and March 2006. Phone companies are constantly keeping tabs on you so that they can unlock phones and help us out of trouble, but this could pose a significant threat to our privacy if they fell into the wrong hands. Is Big Brother watching us? Is it bad or good that we have all this information floating about in cyberspace?

Thankfully, there are lots of things that can help us stay safe on the web. Things like Roboform, a program for PCs, allows you to store all your passwords and details and access them via one "master-phrase" so that you don't juggle passwords, hackers don't get near your data and filling out forms online can be done quicker. To me this is a brilliant idea: it is doubtful (but not impossible) that we will ever find an answer to computer security that doesn't involve some recollection on our part, but Roboform offers to do that for us. Similar products include 1Password for Mac and Password Safe for all computers. The problems come when people misunderstand or just ignore safety policies. Did you know that Facebook can change its privacy policy at any point and we wouldn't necessarily be notified? Safety with web identity depends on us following the rules.

Another safety feature that techies swear by is encrypted data. This is when instead of passwords, which can be cracked quite easily by humans, computers invent a code that makes all your information into gibberish for all those who don't know the code or cipher. The cipher can be translated by a special key, which tells you what the actual information says. These keys can have various bit values - the higher the bit value, the more possible combinations there are. For example, a 56-bit key allows more than 70 quadrillion (70 000 000 000 000 000) combinations. That, I'm sure you'll agree, is quite impressive for a key the fraction of the size of a blank word document. Read more about it here. Encryption is used in computers for all sorts of things, among them protecting personal data and therefore your identity from people, which is rather reassuring.

Another interesting advance in the field of technological identity has come in the shape of the Google Profile (here is the unofficial Google blog explanation). Google is becoming a social network with things like intelligent address books where your contacts are "friends" and calling emails "conversations". To this avail it has a new feature that lets those who you allow to view it access all the social networks you want your friends to see. Cool. A network that lets you access blogs, Facebook and Twitter, all in one place. It looks like it will be big - really big. It also shares all your contact details, though, and when you can be searched on the web that might not be so good. But never fear, Google lets you choose who sees the important stuff. Read more here.

So. Places you can have profiles or an identity: Facebook, blogs, microblogs, instant messenger, the list goes on. Even your email is likely to disclose some information about you: my email is the name of where some of my cousins live. Some people like to use their names. Interesting (if slightly odd) psychological questions: does our email address show who we really are? If not that, what does? Is our Facebook or our blog who we are online and offline, one, the other, both? Are we safe in the knowledge that our data is safe under password or encryption? I suppose that we will only know what's safe when we are let down by it.

Here are some worthwhile videos.




Another video, this time about how we identify ourselves to websites.