Who hasn’t had mixed feelings about the digital invasion of our lives. Victoria Shannon of IHT taps into that sentiment in her recent article, Battling Future Shock. She writes:
Nicholas Negroponte wrote a futuristic book in 1995 called “Being Digital.” In just over a decade, the future has arrived for many people: We are living digital lives, at work, at home and at play.
Along the way, we have discovered some of the drawbacks to this wide-eyed world of wonder. It is not always a safe and secure digital life, littered as it is with viruses, fraud and spam.
Nor is it a digital life with much privacy protection — an Internet provider can track which Web sites we have visited, just as a cellphone carrier can pinpoint our location and subway turnstiles can reveal where we came from and where we went.
And sometimes, the digital life simply doesn’t work as advertised, as when the text messages we have come to rely upon inexplicably fail to be delivered across cellphone networks, or when the seat-back TV channels on Hong Kong’s state-of-the-art commuter trains emit only a snowy screen instead of the news.
Many of the downsides are the price we pay for the conveniences we receive; many others are a trade-off between security and privacy. But the result can be a bad feeling about information technology.
In terms of solutions, the article supports the notion of a trusted ecosystem…
Srivastava is endorsing systems that require at least two endpoints to manage the information. That way, personal data are released only as necessary and only in the context of the current task: in other words, e-mail that identifies you only by address rather than piling on other attributes like location, kind of browser and PC. That alone could go a long way to eliminating some of the digital static in our lives.
One common “federated” identity system — that is, one operated not by a single entity — is the automated teller machine of the banking industry. The reason privacy can be better protected with a federated system, she said, is that it requires an identity provider, like the bank, and a service provider, like the ATM operator. The identity provider passes along only enough information needed to process the transaction.
Many companies are working make the trusted ecosystem a reality. Bill Gates had a well-received speech on this at this year’s RSA conference. Those interested in diving into more details can read that speech here.
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