Privacy and Identity

One of the bet­ter pieces on iden­tity and pri­vacy that I’ve read recently, and well worth every­one read­ing, wheth­er you do any­thing much with iden­tity man­age­ment or not, is from Dav­id Wein­ber­ger. Iden­tity man­age­ment in an unequal world dis­cusses how when sign­ing up for things is easi­er, people can take advant­age of that to ask us to sign up more often, to give more inform­a­tion than we really need to. I’ve been well trained at Sun to ask now why any­one needs the inform­a­tion they’re ask­ing for. Can­’t they do with less inform­a­tion? What are they going to do with it? These are the basic ques­tions every­one needs to ask every time some web site or shop asks for per­son­al inform­a­tion of any sort, basic­ally why do they want it and why do I need to give it? If more people ask the reas­on why, maybe few­er com­pan­ies will be need­lessly intrusive.