Safer Internet Day and beyond means serious fun with identity and privacy
February 9th, 2010 by Tim Greenhalgh
Safer Internet Day 2010 has again raised awareness of safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially among children and young people globally.
Insafe launched a pan-European quiz on 1st February, for 5-11 and 12-15 year-olds, open to individuals or school classes who compete with the objective of becoming increasingly aware of their role in protecting themselves and others online. An online SID Fair will also showcase participating organizations across the world, and schools are invited to register the events they will be running to mark the day.
SID’s “Think before you post” campaign asks not only young people but also challenges every digital citizen to examine how we deal with identity and privacy in digital environments. It’s a subject that academic colleagues Lorraine Warren and Kieron O’Hara have looked at in some detail.
There’s still a long road before we have constructed a theory and research methodology so Lorraine and Kieron’s early work is extremely valuable in mapping out the terrain.
Lorraine sets up the challenge and the goal really nicely in her recent posts; she argues for more detailed understanding of identity and its consequent effects on our view of online privacy. How, when and where we construct selves online has meaning for how we responsibly manage privacy.
As she says: “The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in Web 2 world, but looking forward into a web 3 world too. In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.”
Her views are amplified in a post on privacy and identity in the digital age that deals with separation of multiple online identities
Dr Warren’s University of Southampton colleague Kieron O’Hara, also draws out a few pathfinder ideas in recent papers on the limits of the person, privacy and empowerment which are worth reading in detail(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17123/ and http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18242/).
Out of all these early discussions, we can build a coherent picture that helps us focus on how we understand and engage online; what’s really valuable and worth protecting.
And, as Venessa Miemis argues in her EmergentbyDesign blogpost, as social networks expand they force us to reassess the nature and value of privacy and identity. At the same time, they also engineer an effect that changes relationships and responsibilities. This drives people to position their personal reputation in terms of the value it has to the networks to which they are connected. This echoes Dr O’Hara’s ideas around privacy as a public good and that is an area where open discussion and detailed research would make a positive contribution to our understanding of what we are online.
The debate continues and the Privacy and Identity panel, postponed postponed in January because of ‘snow on the mind’, has now been rearranged for Tuesday 23rd March at The Royal Society in London.
Details of the event are here http://webscience.org/events.html.
Tags: Emergent By Design, identity, Kieron O'Hara, Lorraine Warren, privacy, Safer Internet Day, University of Southampton, Venessa Miemis, webscience.org
