Your Internet Footprint

The role of the internet in people's everyday life is already huge, and it is expanding every day. Facebook currently has about 400 million users, Amazon and other internet retailers generate billions of dollars, and the world of web 2.0 applications continues to grow. I know I have dozens of accounts tied to several email addresses and usernames at various websites; many of which I have forgotten about. Without any record or physical location for these sites to exist, this can be anywhere from a nuisance, to a security and identity problem. How will this be remedied in the near future?

Arguments for Universality

Universal identification and password systems provide an internet enable population security and the ability to control all of their important data as one system. Something as simple as a universal identification protocol that many sites can adhere to at least allows a person to keep their email, banking, and purchasing accounts all tied under a single secure entity. For official records like these, the multitudes of accounts and password systems doesn't make much sense, and password recovery practices just make these less secure. As a professor of mine once said, "When you are given a security question from a website, it is best to just pound your fist on the keyboard."

Arguments for Anonymity

We leave little traces of our identities all over the internet. Some cookies here, logged data here, sessions, passwords, all add up to a pretty scary world. If your entire identity could be tied to a single identification, the motivation for people to crack that system is huge. While there are many situations for official internet identification, perhaps that level of identification is not something that should be passed around to every website you want to have an account with. The more you put information that could tie your real world assets in the virtual world, the more risk you are taking. So for sites like social networks, language learning communities, forums, and free blogging websites, perhaps it is best that you are only tied to a username, secondary email account that can be tossed if it was stolen.

Also with a system where your entire identity is centralized and controlled, privacy becomes endangered. People tend not to like having governments or seemingly benevolent companies tracking their every move, even though this kind of activity is already occurring and on the rise.

I believe there is some room in the internet for an open, high security identification protocol if measures are taken to prevent any organization from becoming a big brother.