Who Owns Your Identity?
June 14th, 2006
Marc Hedlund, in an essay at O’Reilly Network, asks:
Who owns your online identity? Do you? Most likely, you don’t — almost all Web sites that have a concept of identity do (and badly want to) maintain an identity profile for each of their users. At the end of the day, that identity belongs to them, not you.
Marc’s question stems from a message he received from Yahoo telling him he had to choose a new username for his My Yahoo account.
In the end, Marc closed his My Yahoo account rather than migrate, and offers this advice:
The lesson should be clear: you cannot entrust your online identity to a business if that identity is meaningful to you. If you want or need your online identity, you must maintain it yourself.
That isn’t to say he thinks there’s no room for a product or service that makes it easier:
There is an opportunity for software businesses that would put identity control directly where it belongs: in the hands of consumers. Some products, such as AdSubtract, already are succeeding by making the Web easier to use while returning control over personal information to users. There are, however, plenty of other uses for a user’s local hard drive, and the successful companies will find a way to combine privacy (which tends not to be a great selling point) with performance and features (each of which do sell).