Kaliya Hamlin tackles our online identities
Source: O Brien
As social media and mobile computing explode, debates over privacy and security have escalated. People are becoming increasingly uneasy about what companies like Facebook and Google might be doing with all of our data.
But these same trends raise questions about another topic that gets far less attention: our online identity. It's in this vital but less heralded area where Kaliya Hamlin, 35, aka "Identity Woman," has become one of the most influential voices in Silicon Valley.
On Tuesday, the World Economic Forum acknowledged Hamlin's work in this area by announcing she was one of the 192 people from around the world selected for its Young Global Leaders program. The WEF is based in Switzerland, and is perhaps best known for organizing the annual Davos forum.
Hamlin is hopeful that the recognition by the WEF will help elevate the discussion of identity into the mainstream.
"How do I present myself online in the way that I want?" Hamlin said. "That's the challenge I've been trying to solve."
The WEF also honored several other people from Silicon Valley, including: Drue Kataoka, an independent artist; Salman Khan of Khan Academy; Ken Howery of Founders Fund; Jonathan Levin of Stanford University; Adam Lowry of Method Products; JB Straubel of Tesla Motors; and Dave Fischer of Facebook. People like Hamlin interest me because they constitute what I think of as tech's quiet influencers. Their power doesn't flow from holding a big corporate title, but from their passion around a subject and their ability to persuade others through their writing, talks and research.
Hamlin is perhaps one of the valley's most notable influencers in this whole notion of online identity. For more than a decade, the Vancouver native, who now lives in Alameda, has been making her living by organizing identity conferences, blogging about the topic and speaking at conferences around the world about identity.
"Within the identity community, there is a widespread recognition that she's been a very important player," said Bob Blakley, an identity and privacy analyst for Gartner. "And that's one of the reasons I was happy to see the award. That recognition is now more public."
It's important to make a distinction here between three related topics: privacy, security and identity.
Privacy is about the ability to control your personal information and decide what to share and not to share.
Security is about how safe that personal information is from people that you don't want to see it.
Identity is about deciding how you appear online and how the world sees you.
For many of us, Facebook has become the default keeper of our online identities. We pour enormous amounts of information into our Facebook profiles, and then we turn around and use Facebook to log in to numerous other services around the Web. Who we are on Facebook has become who we are online.
Years ago, Hamlin became worried that a single corporation would control our identity and has been trying to thwart that scenario for more than a decade, even before the rise of social networking and the founding of Facebook.
Among the problems with ceding control of our identity to one company, Hamlin argues, is that when creating our online identities, we have to play by Facebook's rules. For instance, you might want to have multiple identities online that express different parts of your life or personality that you want to keep separate from others. But under Facebook's terms of service, you are supposed to have only a single account using your real name.
When Google+ launched last year, many so-called open identity advocates were disappointed that the service didn't allow the use of either pseudonyms or multiple identities. Hamlin was among many of those attempting to pressure Google to change the policy. Earlier this year, Google announced a policy to include alternative names in your profile, but has yet to agree to allow fully anonymous profiles.
Beyond that, many of these companies are taking your digital information and mashing it together in ways that create a portrait of you online that you may or may not like, or even recognize, Hamlin says. What if all this information creates the impression, for instance, that you're pregnant, flooding you with ads and suggested connections related to pregnancy? If you're not pregnant, how do you fix that misperception?
As an alternative, Hamlin and others have been trying to build alternative identity lockers that allow us to create and manage elements of our digital identity outside the walls of any single company. That would allow us to make our own rules and carefully curate one or more identities that we can chose when and where to deploy.
"We need our own independent digital identities that aren't subject to the control of a large corporation," Hamlin said. "If we don't have those rights in a digital society, then we don't have a truly free society."
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