an imperfect analogy, but consider the case of vehicle safety. Car manufacturers let consumers pick engine size, colour and the fabric on the seats, but not the design of the seat belt. Rather than let people figure out the optimal seat belt for themselves, experts pick a standard. We must be getting close to this point when it comes to identity standards.
The reason is that privacy is important. Privacy permits individuals to express unpopular ideas to people they trust without having to worry about how society will judge them. It is vital to democracy and it contributes to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and the promotion of the truth.23 Privacy, however, is not enough. Private property creates social order and a peaceful society requires a clear allocation of goods and rules for their public use.24 In other words, as is well known, privacy needs security. So we need security as well.
A privacy paradox
One of the simplest ways to demonstrate both how non-intuitive some aspects of the problem are and also how the use of new technology can deliver new solutions is to consider what I have called the Chatroom Paradox. My kids want to go into chatrooms to discuss everything from computer games to saving the planet. I will only allow them into chatrooms if I know that the other people in the chatrooms aren’t serial killers, perverts and so forth. In order to make sure of this, I therefore want the name and address of everybody else in the chatroom so that I can validate them against sex-offenders’ registers. However, if somebody else in the chatroom wants my kids’ names and address to check them against a register, I don’t want to give it to them. What if there’s a mistake and they really are a serial killer or pervert? This then is the paradox: in order to harness the power of the Internet, I want full disclosure from everybody else who wants to be part of the subgroup but will refuse any kind of disclosure on my side. Stalemate.
Yet as we technologists will readily point out, through the miracle of public key cryptography, it is straightforward to implement unconditionally unlinkable identities which allow subgroup members to prove to each other that they are over 18, a British citizen, a Manchester City fan, or anything else, without disclosing their identity in a way which could be compromised.
This might also be a way to approach the challenges set out at high level in Hillary Clinton’s speech on ‘Internet rights and wrongs’ back in 2011.25 She called for (I paraphrase) freedom of communications for people that we like, but not for people that we do not like. It’s probably unfair to pick on her about this, because a great many politicians have called for the same thing without having any idea of how it might be achieved.
Such calls demonstrate that it is hard to think about identity and related issues in a networked world using the mental models of the ‘old’ world. As described here, though, we’ve been here before. The emergence of the modern passport involved more than the development of new technologies and techniques to document individual identity. It also required a critical rethinking of identification and identity.26 The result was, it is fair to argue, the emergence of a new identity, one distinct from how people had previously thought of themselves. The emergence of a new passport equivalent will lead, yet again, to a new form of identity, yet again distinct from how we think about ourselves now.
Chapter 3
A new identity for a new world
The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communications constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.
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