User:Bettinusz/sandbox

For related uses, see Internet identity

Digital identity is a psychological identity that prevails in the domains of cyberspace, defined as the set of data that uniquely describes a person or a thing (sometimes referred to as subject or entity) and contains information about the subject's relationships to other entities. A critical problem in cyberspace is knowing with whom you are interacting. In essence, the problem is that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Currently there are no ways to precisely determine the identity of a person in digital space. Even though there are attributes associated to a person's digital identity, these attributes or even identities can be changed, masked or dumped and new ones created. Despite the fact that there are many authentication systems and digital identifiers that try to address these problems, there is still a need for a unified and verified identification system in cyberspace. Thus, there are issues of privacy and security related to digital identity.

Related terms

Subject and entity

A subject or entity is a person, an organisation or a non-human subject such as a software, a server or a machine making a request to access a digital resource. A resource can be a website, a database, or a bank transaction.

Attributes, preferences and traits

Every digital subject has a finite, but unlimited number of identity attributes. Attributes are acquired and contain information about a subject, such as medical history, purchasing behaviour, bank balance, age and so on . Preferences retain a subject's choices such as favourite brand of shoes, preferred currency. Traits are features of the subject that are inherent, such as eye colour, nationality, place of birth. While attributes of a subject can change easily, traits change slowly, if at all.

Authentication and trust

In order to assign a digital representation to an entity, the attributing party must trust that the representation does indeed belong to the entity (see Authentication below). Conversely, the entity may only grant selective access to its informational attributes. In this way, digital identity is better understood as a particular viewpoint within a mutually-agreed relationship than as an objective property. This contextual nature of digital identity is referred to as contextual identity.

Authentication

Authentication is a key aspect of trust-based identity attribution, providing a codified assurance of the identity of one entity to another. Authentication methodologies include the presentation of a unique object such as a bank credit card, the provision of confidential information such as a password or the answer to a pre-arranged question, the confirmation of ownership of an e-mail address, and more robust but relatively costly solutions utilising encryption methodologies. In general, business-to-business authentication prioritises security while user to business authentication tends towards simplicity. New physical authentication techniques such as iris scanning, handprinting, and voiceprinting are currently being developed and in the hope of providing improved protection against identity theft. Those new techniques fall into the area of Biometry (biometrics), which belongs to the area of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.

Authorisation

Authorisation is the mechanism by which a system determines what level of access a particular authenticated user should have to secured resources controlled by the system. For example, a database management system might be designed so as to provide certain specified individuals with the ability to retrieve information from a database but not the ability to change data stored in the datbase, while giving other individuals the ability to change data.

Security issues and privacy

With automated face recognition, tagging, location tracking and widespread digital authentication systems many actions of a person become easily associated with identity, as a cause, sometimes privacy is lost and security is subverted. An identity system that builds on confirmed pseudonyms can provide privacy and enhance security for digital services and transactions. Cyberspace creates opportunities for identity theft.Exact copies of everything sent over a digital communications channel can be recorded.Thus, cyberspace needs a system that allows individuals to verify their identities to others without revealing to them the digital representation of their identities.

Anonymous/pseudonymous attribute systems

An anonym is an authenticated attribute that is not linked to an identifier. An anonymous identifier identifies the person once. If it is used more than once, becomes a pseudonym. A pseudonym is an identifier associated with attributes but with no permanent identifier.

Legal issues

Clare Sullivan presents the grounds for digital identity as an emerging new legal concept. The Identity Cards Act confirms Sullivan's argument and unfolds the emergent new legal concept comprising of database identity and transaction identity. Database identity refers to the collection of data that is registered about an individual within the databases of the scheme and transaction identity is a set of information that defines the individual's identity for transactional purposes. Although there is reliance on the verification of identity, none of the processes used are entirely trustworthy. The consequences of digital identity abuse and fraud are potentially serious, since in possible implications the person is held legally responsible.

Business Aspects

Corporations have begun to recognize the Internet's potential to facilitate the tailoring of the online storefront to each individual customer. Purchase suggestions, personalised adverts and other tailored marketing strategies are a great success to businesses. Such tailoring however, depends on the ability to connect attributes and preferences to the identity of the visitor.

Other

Internet and digital identity

The potential of the Internet to globally reshape the politics of identity is partly concealed by the fact that it is an amalgam of innovations that have long been with us. The first revolution of instant messaging, for example, came through the invention of the telegraph. Households first became connected to a global network of instant communication through the widespread use of the telephone. And, in another repackaging of earlier transformations, the introduction of Internet access to politically isolated communities seems to have an effect similar to that of literacy, only more quickly paced, including raising the status of those who have the skills to use it, providing them with an ability to communicate (and hence establish political connections) over great distances, and, at the most skilled level, providing access to legal knowledge that confers an advantage in dealing with state administrations. While acknowledging such familiar dynamics, we should not avoid the possibility that the Internet is mapping a new geography of identity formation. In this medium, the only limits to the construction and presentation of culture—even cultures that embody the primal values of technological simplicity and self-sufficiency—are access (directly or through intermediaries) to computer hardware, a telephone infrastructure, and a modicum of sophistication in their use. The so-called anti-globalization movement has shown that simultaneous instant messaging to a large number of subscribers is a powerful tool of political activism, which has been particularly evident in the protests that have taken place at virtually every major economic summit since the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. This tool is now also serving the organizational purposes of a wide array of once marginalized communities. The global cognitive/political revolution following from the spread of alphabetic literacy to previously oral societies has therefore recently magnified its effects through ICTs. And along with these technologies, a new stratum of computer literati is reshaping the status hierarchies, resistance strategies, and conceptions of collective self of many so-called traditional societies. The study of community self-presentation on the Internet would by itself run up against received ideas about ethnographic location, relying as it does on unbounded, de-localized digital artifacts. 1 The approach that I take here, however, uses surveys of Internet material as a supplement to field ethnography rather than a substitution for it. Many of the implications of Internet activism do, as I will show, follow directly from the nature of the medium, regardless of social context. But by itself, such an approach to ethnography would rightly be criticized as an exclusive reliance on literature, albeit in a new form, without grounding in the interpersonal nuances of recognizable, accessible communities. Consequently, this investigation of spatially and temporally abstract digital artifacts has as its starting point some three years of research, spaced over more than a decade, in several Cree communities of northern Quebec and Manitoba, less extensive studies in northern Finland and West Africa, and participation in international meetings that, despite new possibilities in electronic communication, continue to be a focal point for a global network of indigenous peoples.

Identity system and its functions

A digital identity system must serve several functions. First, authentication-ensuring that when a message purports to be from Alice, Alice sent it, not someone pretending to be Alice. Second, message integrity-providing certainty that when a message arrives from Alice, it is the same message that Alice sent, not modified en route in any way. Third, non-repudiation-ensuring the inability of Alice later to deny that she sent the message, and the inability of the recipient of Alice's message to deny that the message was received. Finally, establishing a digital identity architecture may have the beneficial side effect of facilitating confidentiality through encryption-the knowledge that no one besides Alice can read a message intended for her. For our analysis in this paper, a digital identity system must serve the first three functions, and may serve the fourth.