The Online Identity Crisis

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid via Flickr

The intense identity aggregation of products like Google and Facebook is pushing users towards anonymous services. Whisper and Secret are both making headlines, each promising an escape from the ruthless scrutiny of mainstream social networks. While these services are great for providing a momentary distraction, they are still doing nothing to address the core problem of online identity.

In real life, there are very few situations where it is useful or even desirable to be anonymous outside of explicitly anti-social or criminal behavior. The standard examples of corporate leaks, personal confessions, honest reviews, etc., do not benefit from true anonymity. Instead, people want to expose some subset of their identity and nothing more.

For example, an Apple employee who wants to release a corporate leak does not want Apple to discover who he or she is, but it is still important that others know that the person is an Apple employee and not just a random fan. Likewise, if someone confesses something about their personal life, they want to do it with a supportive community and not to strangers who do not care about or have a lasting relationship with them.

It is not about being anonymous or even pretending to be someone else. It is about controlling which subsets of true facets of a person are relevant in different social contexts. This is fundamentally not deceptive but actually enables one to be authentic.

Outside of the Internet, it is extremely difficult to find out information about a person so that we can easily and naturally compartmentalize our experiences. A person can go to a health support group and discuss issues with their diagnosis, and then later they can go to a car show and discuss their love of 60’s muscle cars. They don’t worry much about someone in the car show reacting poorly to them because they are sick. This person is not a different person in these settings — it is always the same person — but different parts of their identity are relevant.

The Googles and Facebooks (GoogleBooks?) of the world want to aggregate all of these personas into a single identity. They want to do this, not because they think this is good for users or because this is how they think society works, but rather because it helps them monetize user interactions. However, this type of aggregation is a very bad deal for users.

Users’ primary experience with this comes in the form of hyper-targeted ads. A perfect example of this is when someone goes to an online health support group to do some searching or posting, and then navigates to the car community. In the car community, that person will receive ads targeting them as a health support group member. This is a scary proposition. Even though users primarily are reacting to this “Google stalking” factor, there is actually a subtle but much more insidious force at work.

These services are making an extremely strong push to get users to sign in everywhere on the Internet with a single ID. This is initially great for those who do not want to remember many passwords. But when this is done, GoogleBook is able to aggregate an identity into their system, and all activity on that new site is mixed with everything else the user has told them before. Most people are not really aware that this is undermining the trust relationships that they have with those new sites.

When a person decides to share information with a service, they make a trust decision that is between them and that other entity. They can decide to purchase things from Amazon knowing that Amazon will retain their purchase history and use that to create an “Amazon Identity.” Most people are OK with OpenTable knowing where they go out to eat, and they trust their bank with their account information and they trust their fellow health community members with their personal struggles. For each of these entities, they have made a conscious trust decision.

But when a user signs in through GoogleBook, that trust is tossed out the window. They are implicitly granting GoogleBook the union of all of those trust relationships. Through GoogleBook, they give away their identity to all of GoogleBook’s advertisers and other players. So, they are not only suddenly trusting GoogleBook with their Amazon purchase history, they also potentially are trusting OpenTable and Clash of Clans with that information as well. This is a fundamental undermining of these original trust relationships which is certain to lead to very large problems down the road.

Dave Vronay is founder and CEO of Heard.