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Friendster and Digital Identity
internet, society & sociology
June 12, 2003, 06:41 PM
At Kenneth's urging, I joined Friendster today, mostly just to poke around. So far it seems like an interesting place that takes a new angle on the whole “meeting people” problem; it leverages social networking concepts to introduce people to one another (basically, “I know Bob who knows Joe who knows Jane who has interests in common with me, so maybe I can get Bob to get Joe to introduce me to Jane”). Micah pointed out that there isn’t any good way to visualize your social network right now using Friendster, which is a fair criticism, but it’s good to see that people are doing something useful with all this social software rhetoric.
Currently, however, Friendster has a problem with “fake users”, generally imitators of celebrities. Since anyone with an email address can create a Friendster identity, some people make up these fake identities as a joke, which several others add to their list of friends. The problem is this breaks the intent of the system, since this fools the system into linking you to several people who you actually have no social network connection with. (At least, no known connection with. Six degrees and all that notwithstanding.) It seems Friendster needs to implement an option for people who aren’t directly connected to one of these users to “bullshit” a friend-of-a-friend, thereby removing that connection from their own social network (although without disturbing the networks of everyone “upstream” of them).
However, this design idea is a point solution to a larger issue that affects not only Friendster but most any social software running on a network like the internet: there is currently no way to maintain a consistent digital identity online. This is essential for most social systems, since most such systems must have a way to link actions to individuals over time. We humans use identity for many, many things; I’m finding from my news reading inquiries that the author of a piece of commentary or analysis is one of the main considerations people use when determining whether or not to read that piece (people read articles by authors they have read and liked before). In the real world, we have people’s physical appearance, voice, etc. to define their identities. We will need something comparable in the virtual world to replicate this same sense of familiarity and trust, and prevent problems like the one facing Friendster. Until such a mechanism exists, social networking systems must blindly trust the population of the entire world, and there will always be someone who wants to screw around.
The problem, of course, is that privacy comes up whenever anyone mentions digital identity. People are skittish about entrusting their personal identities to the computer; most don’t understand it well enough and are scared off by stories of hackers and identity theft. They need to feel comfortable that they exert control over what information is provided to whom, that they can provide highly personal information when they wish and little to no information when they wish. Some of these issues were raised at the CHI privacy, security, and trust talks. Maybe I should go back and read some of the papers.
Not all of these fears are groundless. Aside from the numerous technical security hurdles, there is the problem that if you have a unique identifier associated with your online activities, anyone can associate any information they wish with this identifier. If this identifier is traceable to you, which it must be for it to fulfill its purpose, then this information will stick permanently, which opens up whole new possibilities for slander. The internet is a big place. Its hard to find where all the rumors lie.
Building unique digital identities online is simultaneously one of the most promising and most dangerous tasks we face in this new society we’re starting to form. I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.
Posted by Rob on June 15, 2003 at 05:52 PM
Another manual trackback follows.
Marc Canter picked this article up over at Marc's Voice: http://blogs.it/0100198/2003/06/14.html#a1278
Thanks for your kind words, Marc. :)
Posted by arivin on June 08, 2007 at 04:40 AM
nothing