The Connections Blog

There has been much discussion in the United Kingdom this past week about online security and the potential for misusue of information digital identities.  This has been prompted by the news that detailed information of around 7 million families, totalling around 25 million citizens, had been written onto two CDs and posted from one government department to another but had not arrived at the intended destination.  There have been many serious questions asked at the very highest levels of government and intense media interest in this because of the potentially sever impact this could have for so many people and the implications in general as we become an increasingly digitized society.  More information can be found at a number of sites, including the BBC.

Also there have been articles in some newspapers and on one of the major national radio stations (Radio 4) about people revealing too much information about themselves on Social Networking sites, such as Facebook and Bebo.  The basic premise is that some of the current ways organizations verify the identity of a person, such as a standard question which might be the name of your first pet or where you first went to school etc etc, are freely available on some of these sites and could be misused by people wanting to take advantage of someone's online identity.  A further point was made that these sites are also increasingly being used by employers to check out prospective employees and people have to be aware that whatever the post on these sites, could potentially be there for many years to come.  Another aspect of using these sort of sites, is that often in real life the different social networks we belong to do not always cross-over very well, for example, being a colleague, parent, friend, acquaintance, member of a speciality interest group, are for various reasons, some times best kept very separate, which is often not easy to do on some of these sites (more on future posts).

I also noticed in one of today's papers that there are some simple and sensible techniques to help protect your identify that people should follow but we still need to be conscience of our online identity.  New techniques are evolving all the time and one I happened to hear about on a popular radio show was Gridsecure. This is an innovative service to improve on what I consider the somewhat flimsy security offered by a four digit PIN code (if someone's seven year old daughter can spot the code it can't be difficult for a fraudster to spot it).  The site is worth a look at to understand the innovative way they use technology to protect our use of technology.

Digital identity is a topic that we will return to as it has major impact on the way that we will be able to make use of the online world, in the meantime, if you have any comments please let us know so we can stimulate some more debate on this area.

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