Symposium on authentication and data permissions

Before, I attended a symposium on user focus files (apml,attention Profiling Markup langauge), authentication (OpenID), and data portability, which was 2009, It's time we got out of the anonymous chat era and entered Facebook's "real-name age".

The discussion focused on the following areas:

Do people have a unique ID that can fully represent themselves and are fixed (like Facebook)? Will they be completely universal in their use of Internet services, apps, and content (like "Log on with Facebook")? If the real name account exists, the file behind it is also complete, whether to create a more civic sense of responsibility of the environment? Who has the right to have the data and to have it spread over the internet? Communication, there is no way to make information channels more flat dispersed? Are there (or do we need to build) a user level or file management structure? Does asking a user's real name make the freedom of speech bound? Real name or not, how much do users care? Should we be concerned about the problem as a technical home?

Until this year these problems have been discussed, but more or less modified.

A few days ago, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with people who discussed these issues in 09, and they are now the technology leaders of some of the top social networks. After discussion, our views on the 09 issues seem to remain in place. Instead, they are excited to collide with technology sparks, and discuss how to combine the information fragments of users across social networks to create a solution for complete information and user profiles.

As far as I'm concerned, the idea is a lot different from a few years ago.

At that time, I think, not unified user identity information, this is a need to solve the organizational data structure flaws. Too many social networking sites, too many users login authentication information, too many personalized content format, users must be tired of coping with the frequent switching of identity.

At the dinner party that night, once again heard the colleagues to raise these questions, in the discussion secret and whisper when the debate is anonymous good or real name good, their views help me to further think clearly of their own position.

I do agree that there is a basic information interaction between different application services that can increase data mining space and have better portability. But this is not a total endorsement, I have my own reasons.

Any apps, tools, social networking sites we use are a reflection of us. They are the truest embodiment of the "medium is the message itself". There is no question of unifying identity to be addressed here.

When a user chooses to log in to a particular app, he chooses a suit, a restaurant, a nightclub, and he is presenting himself.

In more detail, it's a form of self-expression that you choose this trivial action of the app and what you do with it.

When we start using an app (that is, the media we're expressing ourselves in), the form of identity logging and creating content (also known as social action) affects the user's current interaction with the app. Each medium has its own community contract, it creates the user behavior that belongs to this community alone, lets the user can declare and express own image. The fragmentation and the incoherence of the information scattered around them make the difference between them.

The gap between apps is less important (though we wanted to destroy the Berlin Wall in 09). In most cases, Instagram users do not want updates to appear on Facebook. This is not a problem, but a real user scenario.

In short, there is no information structural problem between social networks (forgive my engineer's style and always want to find the elegant unified solution). There is no question of anonymity or real name. Each app is a medium that lets us express ourselves in the real world. And this oneself, is has many sides, that is more filling more complete oneself. In fact, every day we need this expression.

In fact, the emergence of various media, extinction, change, everyone is three minutes of heat, only a small part of the mainstream. We can choose what we wear, choose which bar to go to, choose which app to use. The bottom line is that we choose a way of life that allows us to tell our own story.