digital id conference

I spoke earlier on at the Digital ID Forum.  Surprisingly for what was effectively a business get-together, I was already the fourth person to mention Foucault by the time I stood up at 10am. Perhaps the sociologisation of business knowledge is happening quicker than I reckoned with. Here's my powerpoint, in case any attendees want to have another look.

Comments

[Phil]

That looks like an interesting presentation. The point about digital ID figuring on both 'sides' of the anonymity/privacy divide is particularly good - in retrospect it's obvious, but only in retrospect.

I think I'm more pessimistic than you about the prospects for an effective politics of identity, or even for much of an 'arms race'. I also think your binary opposition needs to be broken down further, or perhaps cross-tabulated with the earlier traditional/modern pairing. I mean, resistance to your dystopian vision of a managerially-imposed, ubiquitously readable single identity could be articulated on the grounds that I should be free to use one identity in Second Life, another on my blog and a third on eBay - but it could also be articulated (perhaps more effectively) on the grounds that I should be free to be a researcher in the morning, a parent in the afternoon, a musician in the evening and a TV viewer at night, without anyone but me being able to put together all those activities and their associated identities. The opposition between leaving a trail and not doing so seems more fundamental than the opposition between leaving one trail and leaving several.

[Will Davies]

Well in that case it all comes down to ID Cards (and other state services such as NHS IT), because they are the only technologies which currently *force* you to leave a trail. This is why they are controversial.

If you don't want to leave a trail on eBay, don't use eBay. And there are plenty of other aspects of your identity that you could play with, choose and lose which state-centric ID technologies don't touch on.

The problem is that most 'services' do now require you to leave a trail (banks, public services, Tescos), so the political question for privacy activists is whether you should be entitled to a service (or entitled to live in a society where such services exist) without leaving a trail.

[Pablo Rodríguez]

How about posting your presentation in PDF format instead of PowerPoint?

So compatibility problems (even different versions of MS products are not 100% compatible) and font related problems would be avoided.