Throwaway Identities
Written by Jitendra Gupta of KarmaWeb and edited by Richard MacManus
Social Media researcher
danah boyd recently
wrote in her blog about throwaway identities in MySpace:
"Sara created a MySpace using an email address that she made specifically for that purpose. After vacation, she couldn't remember her MySpace password (or her email password). She created a new MySpace page using a new throwaway email address. When I asked her if she was irritated that she had to do this after investing time in the previous profile, she said, "nah.. I had too many Friends that I didn't know anyways."
danah notes that teens often start new accounts on a whim - in IM, email, website logins. The reasons for heavy use of throwaway identities by teenagers are explained by danah in a separate paper, where she posits that in real life "teens have increasingly less access to public space". However online, "youth can build the environments that support youth socialization".
So multiple throwaway identities is another manifestation of teenagers experimenting with new looks, new music etc. As these teenagers mature, I would imagine they will settle on a set of identities and focus on building a reputation around their chosen identities. Incidentally, another implication of throwaway identities is that we have to be more careful in evaluating the user stats for social media sites that cater to teenagers.
Identity management for grownups
Throwaway identities is very different from how I and probably most adults behave online. I have had the same My Yahoo account for 7 years. I hate losing access to an account that I created. As such, I try to keep the accounts that I use to a minimum. If I do create a new account, I use the same standard login name and password that I use for other accounts, to ensure that I can remember and maintain access to it. I do have a junk mail account that I use for registering to sites that I don’t want to get emails from, but I even check that regularly.
How many identities do you have and how do you manage them?
I don’t typically use throwaway identities but, really, there is noting wrong with using throwaway identities to avoid spam or to maintain privacy. This explains the existence and popularity of services like 10minutemail - a new service for creating temporary email addresses. These addresses can be used for registering on sites that require users to provide an email address. The goal is to rid users of a lot of unsolicited spam emails. See a more detailed review here.
But with the easy availability of throwaway identities there is a temptation to use fake identity without carefully thinking through the potential side-effects. If one is not careful, use of a fake identity in wrong situations can cause loss of trust, can ruin the community discourse and can cause serious harm to one’s reputation. See an example of such a blowback at Valleywag and VentureBeat (the Auren Hoffman case).
Commenter behavior in the blogosphere
How can we establish the extent of throwaway identity use in adult online communities? One place to look for an answer is the blogosphere. On serious blogs, commenters can leave comments under any name they like. I have always used my own name while leaving a comment, but does anybody have stats on how many people use fake or context-sensitive names and email address (like using a name ILOVEAPPLE while leaving a comment complimentary to Apple)? My guess is that the use of fake identities is a lot less prevalent in the serious blogosphere, compared to other teenage oriented social media. From my blog I have seen less then 10% of commenters use fake identities. From a discussion with a reliable person at Six Apart, I've heard that the number of Typepad commenters that use fake identities is much higher than 10%. What has been your experience at your blog?
Technology landscape for Identity Management
Social media as a whole
lacks a way to establish global identity of users. Most of the social media identities
are based on an email id, and all of us know how easy it is to create throwaway email
addresses. The earlier efforts around identity management were focused on providing a
service to users to enable them to manage multiple identities together in one central
place. Examples of such services are Microsoft Passport (now
called Windows Live ID) and TypeKey. The
downside of these services is that the service providers, like Microsoft, are privy to
all the user identities and so participate in user transactions. This aggregation of all
user identities in a single service puts too much power in the hands of service
providers. As a result such services have historically not fared well.
What is needed instead is to provide tools that make it easy for the users to manager their own multiple identities. This explains the recent popularity of OpenID – an open source project focused on providing end-users with tools to manage their identity.
One side effect of a lack of a reliable identity mechanism is that there are no incentives for participants in media to behave well, in order to build a reputation. So if a user feels like venting or flaming somebody, why resist? Who is going to remember anyhow? If we had a reliable way to establish user identity, one can build a reputation mechanism evaluating user contributions in social medium. Such a reputation mechanism has the potential to make the social Web medium and user generated content a whole lot more useful. Of course, such a system will need to support an opt-in system, such that users who are interested in using throwaway identities could still use them. But for users, who are interested in building a reputation based on contributions to social media, this will provide incentives and a mechanism to enable it. To a reader of social media, use of a throwaway identity will send a signal about the reliability of a particular piece of content (e.g. a post or a comment) and thereby help them separate signal from noise.
Share2 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1898
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
As a kid growing up in Web1.0 (-1.0?) in the early 90s, I once boasted 47 screennames on AIM alone. Each new screenname was based on my current obsession at the time (puff the magic dragon, bananas, pretending to be god, etc.) Making cool new screennames was a hobby then, and each new screenname would be a chance to start your buddy list over and prune off the ones you were done talking with. I suppose throwaway identities = throwaway friends.
Now I'm all 'grown up' (22) and my contacts list is just the core group of people that I reallly don't want to throw away.
I agree that a good reputation management system could do wonders for the social web. But what is a good reputation management system? Rapleaf? A system where everybody has a 100% score? I would like to understand how you see such a reputation management system evolving, by whom and from where...?
Yme,
I don't think such a system exists and designing a good reputation system is really hard. I don't think you could take an eBay or Rapleaf like system and apply it to social media as it would be too easy to game...
-Jitendra
You are the author of your own life and therefore the authorship should be yours. Just like with any other creation, this should be protected by copyright law.
If not someone else owns you.
Therefore you should have full control of the data about you and decide yourself whether to sell, modify or delete it.
The only solution for reliable identity management therefore is a solution with anonymous browsing combined with a local portable storage of identity data that is controlled by the individual, not a company or other institution. The user should be able to decide what information to release to a service provider, depending on the privacy policy of the provider.
Reason for anonymous browsing is that nowadays it is still quite easy to trace back these throwaway identities to an individual, through the use of cookies and ip-addresses. Although it appears that you can create a new identity, in fact you can't. see(http://www.google-watch.org/cgi-bin/cookie.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_web_browsing)
Until then we will be owned by Google, MySpace or other companies that trade and abuse user data without explicit permission or awareness of the individual.
Strange that these companies lose money on what seems to be there core function and make money on stealing and selling user data in the background in an increasingly successful attempt to predict and control your behavior. The severity of this development outweighs the objection of venting or flaming somebody and even that can be prevented with this solution.
Please be careful:
"I use the same standard login name and password that I use for other accounts, to ensure that I can remember and maintain access to it"
Reusing passwords is *very* dangerous as it opens you up to identity theft. A couple of posts on the subject:
http://passpack.wordpress.com/tag/qa/
30 Boxes has created an infrastructure to do a lot of what is being discussed.
Our Buddy Cards plugin allows for distributed identity and authentication (it will soon be coupled with OpenID).
We also debuted a social reputation system quite a while ago, called a "Truthiness Rating"
Thanks Tara, It seems like an interesting service, I'll check it out.
I understand the security issues involved. My wife actually used different passwords for all her accounts and she is always losing accounts...so what I do is that I have two set of user name and password, one for sensitive info account and another for non-sensitive accounts. I know that is not completely safe but I really hate losing access to accounts or be trying and guessing passwords...
Gert-Jan, I understand your concerns about your information being exploited by big companies, but one has the balance that against the benefits of being connected and participating in "social media". Just like in real-life society, you have to identify yourself before participating, it is valuable to have a mechanism to identify users in social media to promote trust and cooperation.
Excellent post!
I like the idea of using a variant of the site name as a password. This way, I recall it when I come back to the site and I do not have the same password everywhere.
Alex
You've hit the majority of online profiles with this article.
There's some truth in keeping identities and building reputation. Though in my case, I've always kept a brave face commenting with this nick. I hold this precious but then there are times I find myself in the middle of good conversation with online cowards who sign in as anonymous or perhaps as in your example, with throwaway identity. What to do in this situation? Be like like them, join the fun. I'll turn into something else if that's the game. I only do this if it's interesting when people are so shy in revealing their online identity. I don't know what's their purpose and it's none of my business. Otherwise, I won't even come back to take a peek if it's all flaming. It's a waste of time. I've been to this kind of blogs. I think the best way for blog authors is to enable comment moderation if you want to keep track.
I leave comments in major online newspapers, other reputable sources and international organizations with this name. I keep family and work emails differently. I have a small personal blog, so I know most of my regular commenters.
Narendra, I downloaded and checked out the Buddy Card Plug-in. Its an interesting plug-in that could address some of the concerns I am raising here. The thing that is still not clear to me, though, is how do you calculate the "Truthiness Rating", which I guess is the key ingredient here (I hope you can explain it a little bit without giving away too much)...
Thanks,
Jitendra
@Jitendra:
My solution is not at all intended to prevent people from identifying themselves, but to allow them to control what data they are willing to share. So you arrive at a site anonymously and you still can sign up with your real identity (one click because you own your data). Depending on the privacy policy of the site and the level of trust you have in its owners, you decide whether you want to give them additional data on top of your name and email, like preferences or browser behavior.
Visiting any site without such a solution is like silently agreeing to all privacy policies and terms of the owner of the site, which are often very lengthy, tricky and difficult to understand documents. So if you want to use the internet nowadays, you are forced to hand over your name, email, ip-address, preferences and behavior.
The final result is that sites respecting peoples privacy and who communicate transparently will get more data from their users than sites like Google and ISP's that collect and use your data without you being aware of it.
Truthiness is a bit like flickr interestingness. We have tried to get a handle on how connected individuals are and to what level they are engaged online. It is a fuzzy metric (hence the name) but it is hard to fake a high rating!
I'm 19, so I can add a teen point of view on this :)
It's normal among teenagers to often send messages to everyone saying you've started a new email or account...
I could see it get frustrating for some people to update everyone. But there's an element of fun and excitement, and even feeling popular in keeping in touch with all your friends.
I think there's two areas that need to be treated separately:
1 - Teenage social things like myspace, IM, video games etc.
2 - Serious things where someone can ruin your career or life by stealing your identity.
In the second area a system like openID is needed, but in the first it's fun to change your identity and it's even part of the experience.
...maybe this is another one of those teenage things? Because it's just normal for my friends to change their login name constantly ^^
Identity theft is very scary and real. If you use the same username and password for everything then you are more likely to have somebody take your identity away from you. For my credit card accounts, bills, etc. I write down the company name and then my username and password in a notebook so then I can keep track of all my usernames and passwords.
undisposable.org is just for that
Does anyone have contact details of these teenagers who constantly change their identities, both in terms of getting different usernames, but also trying out new and obscure things. Becoming part of a 'tribe' for a tempory time, and feeling able to 'try on' identities and interests, and then moving onto the next. I am researching for a project and very much need a case study or someone to have a chat with about it.