Comments on: Identities are Created Through Relationships

By: Rob Lewis

Rob Lewis — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:25:03 +0000

Robin,
Your discussion of ‘practical privacy’ here,
“you may want to disclose something to someone else in the confidence that they will not disclose it further… and depends on the discloser either having some reason to believe that the recipient *cannot* abuse or further disclose the information, or could but will not do so (trust)…”
points out the whole problem of ‘practical privacy management’. Without an authorization component post-authentication, we have no guarantees that the recipient of disclosed information is indeed trustworthy, or that even if being of good intent, the system he uses will not cough up the disclosed goods if compromised.
Thus, to properly manage the flow of business and private data flows, proper ownership-based controls (user, roles,groups) should be matched to a framework that represented the hierarchy of trust relationships within and between groups in an enterprise that would support the private data owner’s, or manager’s disclosure (or sharing) intentions.

By: Robin Wilton

Robin Wilton — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 06:44:00 +0000

This is an excellent article. I suspect that there is some part of one’s “identity” which can be entirely introspective (i.e. does not depend on interaction and therefore relationships), but I also suspect that it is far less significant than that part which does depend on interaction.
Physiologically, humans are built with a disposition to acquire and process external stimulus. Put someone in a sensory deprivation tank and they fairly soon go bananas. Deprive someone of human interaction and they don’t turn out the same as the rest of us (Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, anyone?).
So, yes, I agree… I think relationships are an important/vital factor in developing/maintaining a person’s identity. Identity is, to a large extent, a social construct – even if that construct is founded on some very personal tendencies which are ‘internal’ to the individual.
I think the same principles apply to privacy and confidentiality, too. One view of privacy is that it consists of keeping all one’s information to oneself. Unfortunately, that tends to reduce the utility of the information. Paradoxically, ‘practical privacy’ consists of disclosing information, not keeping it to yourself… though you may wish to keep that disclosure ‘confidential’ – that is, you may want to disclose something to someone else in the confidence that they will not disclose it further.
So, privacy is also mostly relationship-based, and depends on the discloser either having some reason to believe that the recipient *cannot* abuse or further disclose the information, or could but will not do so (trust)…
Hope this is of interest. Thank you for a very interesting post, and thanks also to Richard Veryard for pointing me to it.

By: Davi Ottenheimer

Davi Ottenheimer — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:51:22 +0000

No worries. Gave me a good excuse to link to you ;) http://davi.poetry.org/blog/?p=3731

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:38:01 +0000

Sorry, Davi, I’d forgotten to hit “publish”–when you put in lots f links, the spam filter demons get angry

By: Davi Ottenheimer

Davi Ottenheimer — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:04:33 +0000

Hi, I posted a comment but it hasn’t appeared in days. Looks like your filters will not release it so I put it on my blog instead.

By: Davi Ottenheimer

Davi Ottenheimer — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:14:19 +0000

Interesting thoughts Adam. While Goffman's foundational "presentation" book is widely cited, the more contemporary approach to language and identity can be found in the area of linguistic anthropology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_anthropology). The role of language in identity-making has been a major focus in anthropology since at least since Dell Hymes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Hymes) developed the "ethnography of communication" along with concepts such as "linguistic community" and "community of practice." Jane Hill's recent work on Mock Spanish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_Spanish) and on racism and identity in language is especially relevant in this field. We have found important applications of these concepts in our ongoing study of identity-making in African (419) scam letters, where language is deliberately constructed in such a way as to authenticate false identities and to scam unwitting victims.

By: Dave Birch

Dave Birch — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:01:36 +0000

I’m convinced that this is a very fruitful perspective and could be the basis of some genuine progress. I’m in the process of writing up something that came out some discussions with other people who are exploring a similar approach and I think it’s getting us somewhere. It has great resonance with Esther Dyson’s aphorism about content being an advertisement for a relationship as well.

By: Winfried Tilanus

Winfried Tilanus — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:12:17 +0000

This blog touches the very base of how we organize both our personal world and the (political) world of our formal relations. I found the introduction of the book "Questions of Cultural Identity", edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, very helpful in understanding the relation between these two. In this introduction Stuart Hall asked the question: "Who Needs Identity?". He refines the question to: "... in relation to what set of problems, does the irreducibility of the concept, identity, emerge?" (p. 2)

He sees two area's where you can't get arid of the concept of identity: The first is politics, in the sense of locating people and locating resources to people. The second area is in defining the relations with other people: What do you have in common? Where are you different? This happens in the communication with others and is the base of 'agency', the process of realising your own position and actions.

So when you are talking about identity, keep asking yourself if it is about power or about your own positioning?
The power is about questions like does somebody have the right to access something (e.g. money, a building, care or a computer system), does somebody have the right to make certain decisions. Identity in this sense is always based on the act of identifying somebody as [manager|admin|having a certain credit rating|nobody|etc]. The power is the field of files and SSN's.
Your own positioning is about the relation with other people: what people do you identify with, in what sense do you make yourself different. This is the field of your clothing, the blogs you read, write and react to. This is the field of second life.
The political process of power and the positioning process of relations are two different identity processes that might interleave, but can't be regarded as one.

I see two privacy problems in this respect: the first one is the ever increasing power of institutions. Personal identification numbers make it possible to link the identifications that different institutions made about me to each other. In this way they are forcing me more and more into positions that might or might not be just. What controls are there in place to limit (ab)use of this information? What controls are there for me to find out what is happening to me? What controls are there to correct wrong identifications? What controls power?

The second privacy problem is the mixture of my own positionings inside relationships with the identification process of power. My own positionings can only be understood inside the relations I have with others. But more and more these positionings (or the public visible parts of it) are used to make decisions of power over me. Why should I be strip-searched because of the punk-clothes I wear? Should I be denied a job because it once was part of some relationships to publish a sex-video? This privacy problem is not about keeping my positionings secret, that would make it impossible for me to relate to other people. This is about who takes ownership of the positionings I have. I don't want anybody to take my positionings out of context en (mis)use them for something else.

"So next time someone talks about identity or identity management, ask yourself, what are the assumptions about the relationship? And when you hear someone talking about 'customer relationship management,' ask yourself what identity they seem to want to manage."

Very true indeed, and don't forget to ask yourself: what power do they take and how do they treat the personal positionings of people?

By: shrdlu

shrdlu — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:47:58 +0000

Yes, very, very true — which is why we take so naturally to role-based access control and are missing a big chunk when we ignore role-based identity. When you steal an SSN, people react as if you had exposed their mythical True Name.

By: Larry J. Hughes, Jr.

Larry J. Hughes, Jr. — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:34:56 +0000

So this is really interesting to me. On the one hand, the whole Second Life phenomenon seems to lend credence to identity-as-product-of-relationships. Would you “be” your avatar if not allowed to interact with other avatars? On the other hand, in this physical world, would your identity change if you were imprisoned in solitary confinement for the rest of your life? And if I develop a split personality, do I need separate HealthVault accounts for each one? :) This is indeed a provocative subject!