The first post in this year is about digital identities in the internet and the threats upon the privacy of internet users imposed by changes in the structure of our digital society. It is based on a seminar paper for the course "Digital Technology and Society" at the University of St. Gallen. You will find the paper at the end of this article for the download.
But first of all a little overview on the topic. The IT-magazine iX (german) has had an issue on this social networks and presents on the homepage a rich collection of links to this topic.
First of all, we need to know what digital identities are. Everybody talks about the digital identity management and in connection to this, there is another buzzword: social engineering. Since many internet users have multiple accounts and profiles on different so called social communities, a digital identity is, at least for me, the sum of all available data to one human being available on the internet. Specialised search engines around the topic of persons and/or names have been popping up in the recent years (e.g. Yasni).
The second question I treat in my paper, is the question about the threats and why these threats exist today more than ever (cf. Data Loss Database from the Open Source Foundation). One reason is certainly, that the technical possibilities allow it today to bring together the different identities a person always had (e.g. he/she behaved different in the church than in the pub, although being together with the same people). With social communities and user generated content, this aspect has reached a new dimension, since it is there, where we give (voluntary) away most intimate details about our private life.
This melting together opens then the doors for new threats. I have outlined three in my paper.
- The open architecture of the internet may lead to the fact, that private data is being published without the agreement of the affected person. I called this ''undesired'' information in the sense that maybe the source of the information is not desired.
- Search engines and other sites (such as Archive.org) store data from the internet consistently over the time. Once a information has given away to the cloud a user has nearly any control over it. This is especially bad concerning ''undesired'' information, in the sense that information becomes inappropriate for a user over the time.
- Social hacking is then the most professional mean to abuse private data. As a mean for social hacking you need social engineering to prepare an attack. But this methods are, this is my opinion, used mostly by criminals.
Additionally to the above outlined contents, there is a section containing a little model to deliver a source for explanation.
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