Managing Your Identity Online

MySpace, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 tools led TIME to name you, yes, you, 2006 Person of the Year. With such notoriety, you might want to see what your online identity says about you. What do potential employers and friends find when they google you? When was the last time you googled yourself? What impression do your MySpace profile and YouTube videos leave? Your blog? What do other people say about you? How much control do you have over what is written about you on the web?

Fortunately, new tools and standards can help you manage your online identity. A new breed of web services have started providing ordinary web users with the tools they need to take back control of their online identity.

ClaimID is one web service that enables its users to create a profile of related annotated links. Additionally, claimID integrates open standards, such as OpenID and MicroID for tackling the issues of authority associated with distributed identity. ClaimID profiles thus not only help individuals manage their online identity but also assure that others gain a clear impression of someone's identity across the web. According to claimID, it is “the free, easy way to manage your online identity with OpenID.” While claimID is just one example of personal identity portals, its founders have focused their energies on adopting open, distributed, and nonproprietary standards, while others in this field have focused on different strategies.

Other solutions for managing online identity, including Naymz.com, Ziki.com, and Wink.com, have all taken unique approaches to helping users deal with these issues.

ClaimID's founders, Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell, are Ph.D. students at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC–Chapel Hill). In 2005, Stutzman sent a web crawler through the UNC Facebook network. Not only did he discover that 88 percent of freshmen were on Facebook by the first day of class, but he also found that undergraduates were sharing very private information. For example, nearly 75 percent of freshmen with open profiles were putting forth their political and sexual orientations, which made it clear that an unprecedented proportion of the population was sharing personal information online.

Social networking sites, along with blogs, photo-sharing sites, and other web services, had finally lowered the barriers for mass contributions to the web. Stutzman began to wonder what repercussions this disclosure might have down the road.

Until social networking services gained wide adoption, there was very little content posted online by and about most people. Consequently, it was seldom that you would hear about potential employers googling a prospective employee. Unless they were hiring a web developer, there was little chance they would find anything.

However, with the rising popularity of blogging and the explosion of social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace, googling potential employees quickly became commonplace. Stutzman and Russell recognized that, while particular services such as MySpace may come and go (see "My Space or Your Space," LJ netConnect, Fall 2006. p. 8–12), social web services are here to stay. More important, a whole generation is destined to scatter personal and professional information around the web for the rest of their lives.

As Stutzman and Russell pondered the impact of these personal information trails, an idea began to form. While individuals had some control over what happened to their online personal information, they didn't control a huge amount of information about them.

For example, while individuals can keep their MySpace profiles free of potentially incriminating material, they have limited control over what is said about them on the profiles of their friends or enemies. Further, while one can make his/her MySpace profile private or delete it altogether, a friend's profile may persist well into the future.

In the future, more public records, such as divorce proceedings, will find their way online, posing even greater challenges. Since people don't always control what is said about them on the web, wouldn't it be great if they could justify and clarify what was being said about them?

Many people share the same name. People frequently pick the wrong number out of the phonebook when faced with a lengthy list of John Smiths from the same town, and this issue is only magnified online.

If your name is John Smith and someone googles you, it's not unlikely that the googler can mistakenly think certain information discovered (divorce, etc.) is yours. Wouldn't it be helpful if there were a method to explain which John Smith you are? Conversely, when people google you, will they find all of the articles you have published, or will they be overwhelmed by your doppelgangers' MySpace pages?

In the past, web developers, celebrities, and politicians worried most about their online identity. They could deal with this by using personal or official web pages that acted as information portals. However, millions of people now have significant web presences yet still lack the resources to create such a portal easily.

Not only are people creating profiles on social networking sites, but as online and offline worlds grow closer, more information over which people have less control is landing on the web. For example, letters to the editor are now published online. If someone is applying for a print journalism position, they might want to highlight their bylined articles. However, they need a tool to create such a portfolio.

As Stutzman and Russell pondered these situations, they conceived of claimID as a tool to empower average Internet users to take back control of their online identity.

In the claimID FAQ, Stutzman and Russell explain that they embraced “simplicity and standards” when designing the concept. The common thread connecting all the online identity signifiers together is that they all have a web address.

Consequently, they decided the simplest way to manage an online identity was by enabling users to create a list of web addresses related to their identity. ClaimID provides an easy-to-use form for users to enter web addresses manually. It also provides a bookmarklet, or web browser button, that, when clicked, collects information from the page visited and automatically enters the page title and URL into claimID.

These examples point to different aspects of one's online identity. Stutzman and Russell determined that all types of online identity roughly fall into one of four basic categories:

• The first type is what they refer to as “by you” and “about you.” A social networking profile or personal web site would usually fall into this category.
• The second category is “by you,” but “not about you.” This category includes articles one has written.
• A third category is “not by you,” but “about you.” This category could include both positive and negative articles written about you.
• The fourth category is “not by you” and “not about you.” This includes everything else on the web, such as a MySpace profile from someone with your name.

Because all identity items fall into one of these four categories, claimID prompts users to enter by and about information for every link. Of course, there are many other more specific ways to group sites related to one's identity, so claimID also enables users to sort their collected URLs into different user-defined groups, such as “Articles I have written,” “Social networking profiles,” and “Other John Smiths.”

The listing tool also enables users to annotate each link they save. This allows them to highlight why a link is good or explain away something bad. Once this core list is in place, claimID enables users to round it out with other basic information about their identity by providing a space for a photo and a brief summary of relevant information.

Russell entered the Ph.D. program interested in researching online authority. His background led the duo to contemplate how a user's claimID profile could become an authoritative source regarding the user's online identity. How can someone know that what they are reading on a claimID page is true?

While there is no easy answer, the simplest way is to start to build formal connections between the claimID page and the sites to which it links. Once Stutzman and Russell had enabled users to create and sort an annotated list of web sites related to their identity, they turned to emerging identity standards to add additional value to the list.

They first implemented MicroID, an open standard that provides a way to verify that the person who owns a claimID profile also “owns” the content to which they are linking. A MicroID is a unique string of letters and numbers that is created by combining a given email and URL according to an open standard. Consequently, claimID is able to take the email provided by a user and a URL claimed by the user and generate a unique MicroID. Then a user embeds the MicroID as a piece of metadata in the header of the page that is claimed. ClaimID can then check that site to see if the MicroID is present. If it is, then the owner of the claimID account also controls the linked web site.

Also, because creating a MicroID only requires an email and URL, other web service providers can automatically include a MicroID on the profile pages of their users. They can accomplish this by taking the URL of the user's profile page and the email provided by the user. Consequently, claimID can also verify ownership of profile pages of web services that provide MicroIDs. MicroID has started to gain traction with other successful web properties such as Last.fm and Ma.gnolia.com.

In Web 2.0 applications, a centralized cataloging system can break down because of the sheer quantity of user-generated content. This has led to collecting user-generated tags instead of subject headings. Similarly, claimID's methods hint at future decentralized systems for authority records.

In this new world, each web author is responsible for maintaining his or her own authority record in the form of a claimID page. First, users select pages that are by them. Then, through MicroID or OpenID, they verify their authorship of those pages. If MicroID is incorporated into citation databases, users could even verify authorship of journal articles they have written. Further, by collecting all related links, a user in essence is attaching his or her name as a subject heading to all the sites collected.

In addition to providing insight into how libraries can manage problems of authentication across a number of separate databases, claimID and the standards it employs also offer libraries help regarding authority control. In library catalogs, name authority records provide the definitive guide to how an author is related to different materials. This has been a great model for controlled print collections. ClaimID and other forthcoming identity services point the way to a bright future for clarifying online information.