These two services could put in peril the privacy of Internet users.ĦThe author believes that the idea of privacy on social networks is nonsense at best. Google, as a search engine, is indexing all available information while Facebook, as a social media with 900 million active users, is creating a complete map of the connected world capable of visualizing the interrelationships between everyone on the planet. Ertzscheid notes that what matters most for search engines is to strengthen their economic model. The act of monitoring and tracking is mostly done by cookies and similar techniques. As he points out they are identity-making machines interested in the earliest traces of digital identity and have access to our search history. As for search engines, including neighborhood search engines and other aggregators, they have a central role in letting people know everything about others. They present an eminent risk to our digital identity. Therefore, online users document their digital identity literally, lastingly and in an increasingly transparent manner.ĥAs the author argues, search engines and social media are two prominent examples of the digital identity market. Based on this identification process, online services have easier access to our digital traces which have an economic value. He argues that this process turns into a vicious circle in which it is the system itself which obtains authorization to access the user’s resources. He suggests that the services that we use contribute to engineer identity transparency via their practice of identifying and tracing users.ĤSimilarly, the circle of digital identity goes from identification through authentication (technical procedure of verification such as a password), or certification (by a third party such OpenID protocol) in order to finally obtain authorization to access an online service. Among these three categories of digital traces, the author believes that our browsing traces, which we mostly leave unconsciously on the network, are central to our digital identity. In the light of this chronological order, the author defines digital identity as the total sum of digital traces relating to an individual or a community which can be made up, consciously or unconsciously, of three main categories: “profile traces” (representing who I am), “browsing traces” (representing how I behave) and “written or declarative traces” (representing what I think). The first social traces of the digital identity issue then emerged from 2005 onwards. He suggests that the issue of “personal privacy” began to emerge towards the end of the 1990s and through the early 2000s with the emergence of large social networks from 2003 onwards. He argues that until the mid-1990’s, digital identity was primarily a question of “digital user IDs” in which data security was the dominant concern, particularly for businesses and public administrations. In order to develop these issues, the author focuses on search engines and social media while at the same time presenting the legal remedies and other solutions provided by the private sector.ģAs to the definition of digital identity, the author adopts a chronological approach, going back to the SAFARI case in 1974 which concerned an automated system for handling administrative files in France. E-reputation being presented as the main issue related to digital identity. He describes these issues mostly in an analogical and metaphorical way in order to ensure that his ideas are easily understood.ĢIn order to address the topic, he provides a comprehensive definition of digital identity, before developing the related issues and the risks which are likely to arise in the future. 1As a lecturer in information sciences and communication at the University of Nantes, Olivier Ertzscheid provides an overview of the fundamental issues that every Internet user needs to consider with respect to digital identity.
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