He said he is considering suing the site over what he claims is a “dishonest” review published about one of his hotels and accused the internet giant of trying to “bully” him into silence using threatening letters

[From� Duncan Bannatyne to campaign against 'cowardly' trip adviser - Telegraph]

Look, review sites aren’t going to go away. And they are a good thing. I happened to be talking about reviews to my wife yesterday. She regularly uses a particular web shop to buy all the usual household stuff that neither of us can be bothered to go to the shops for: in yesterday’s case, a new mop for the kitchen floor. She uses that particular site precisely because it publishes bad reviews as well as good ones. When she last looked for a new mop, the one she looked at had very bad reviews. Yesterday, she looked again and there was a new mop, with good reviews. So she bought it. How can you trust good reviews unless you see the bad ones as well?

We need review sites: they are way to make a market more transparent and improve the quality of goods and services. Therefore, making the reviews work is important. How do you do this?

Here’s a question to get the thinking underway: if you let people post under assumed names, will they post rubbish? Can you trust a review site where you don’t know who anyone is either, whether they are astroturfing for corporate puppet masters or opening up information for the people? I travel a lot, so I post a lot on Trip Advisor. But I don’t post under my “real” name – I don’t see why who I am is material. Consequently, I was most interested to read a thorough corroboration of my theory that a pseudonymous interweb is a better interweb.

The platform, which enables people to comment across multiple websites via the same identity, has just released data showing that pseudonymous participation is actually the healthiest type.

[From� Disqus data shows pseudonymous commenters are best « Mariamz]

Well, well. I can think of many reasons why this is true (one of the main ones being that people reveal their real likes and dislikes, prejudices and opinions, views and perspectives under pseudonyms whereas they are alway constrained when using their “real” names) and it certainly matches with my experiences in online chat and debate environments.

Personally, whether it’s positing abusive messages about government ministers or arguing about the merits of a return to the gold standard, I always use pseudonyms unless I am posting in a professional capacity, in which case (I  sincerely hope) my expertise and experience is relevant to the discussion at hand. In some cases I use the same pseudonym across multiple sites, in other cases I use a specific pseudonym.

Pseudonymous identifiers are random identifiers that change for each relying party (so my identity at relying party A might be 123 while my identity at relying party B might be 345). Good pseudonymous identifiers are large random values (so that they are unpredictable) and are not reused across multiple users (so the same identifier is never used at different relying parties for the same or different users).

[From� Conor's Web Log of Esoterica: Pseudonymity would help]

Right. So pseudonyms deliver the best online interaction. But, I will hear you say, who can this scale? With interaction through pseudonyms, there will always be people — even if a tiny minority — getting up to no good. What if you are small business and you get a review like this?

The review said: “Robbed My RAM and Touched 9 Year Old What a scam artist, he stole RAM from my computer and replaced it with smaller chips hoping I wouldnt notice and also I later found out touched my 9 year old inappropriately. A Violator and a rogue trader. DO NOT DO TRADE WITH THIS MAN!”

[From� BBC News - Google removes 'paedophile' claim on review website]

How can you take a civil action against someone for posting a defamation or libel or malicious accusation or whatever? How can you make sure that someone posting a review is actually a customer?

The solution is to institute a simple system of pseudonymous tokens — cryptographic tokens, I mean — so that you the customer can only post a review of something if you have a token showing that you used it, and it should take a court order for the token provider to reveal the person who had the token. This is technologically trivial and can easily be achieved using well-known and well-understood techniques for cryptographic “blinding”. A “blinding” service would work something like this: when you register at the hotel, the hotel chain e-mails you a URL. Later on, you log in to that URL and the system generates a “blinded” token that the hotel chain digitally signs and sends back to you. Whereupon you unblind it. To write a review, you must submit the token. The review site can easily check the digital signature from the hotel chain that proves that you did stay at the hotel during the previous month (or whatever) but doesn’t link to your identity. The hotel can be sure that you were a customer, but neither they nor the review service know who you are. If you post something that is against the law, a court can then order the blinding service to turn over the connection.

It’s not only review sites that might make use of such a service because there are many sites where� who you are is material to the discussions and there may be not entirely honest reasons for using a pseudonym.

The chief executive and chairman of cashless payments vendor USA Technologies has resigned over “inappropriate” comments he posted on the Yahoo Finance message board… George Jensen posted approximately 450 comments on the forum, primarily under the alias ‘investor.texas’.

[From� Finextra: USA Technologies CEO quits over message board posts]

Which reminds me of something. A linguistic clarification to distinguish between pseudonyms (which are identifiers) and personas (which are bundles of attributes around an identifier). Robin Wilton is surely right to insist that there is a difference

However, a persona can also consist of a number of attribute assertions (“I am male, single and over 20″), without containing either a ‘genuine’ identifier (Kal-El) or a pseudonymous one (Clark Kent) – therefore I maintain that personas and pseudonyms as distinct rather than identical.

[From� Racingsnake -
the blog of Future Identity: Liberty, pseudonymity and personas]

Personas may use anonyms, pseudonyms or absonyms. But I’m having second thoughts about the word “absonym” that I made up to mean the “real name” of something. It bothers me that the derivation mixes Latin (“absolute”) and Greek (“name”). I’m wondering about going all Greek with “alethnym” (“true name”) or just going for something that mixes more wildly but sounds better (such as “pravdanym” using Russian or “verinym” trimming the Latin “veritas” or “emenym” abusing the Hebrew “meet” and simultaneously evoking the stage name “eminem” to get down with the kids). Suggestions?

Anyway, you get the idea. Technology has a solution to a real societal problem. Perhaps the way to actually get something done would be to put forward that solution, using existing technology, but inside the kind of framework envisaged in the NSTIC. It would be easy for a US newspaper, say, to require commenters to have a digital identity from a US provider. These digital identities should be pseudonymous as a default: thus, I can post political comment or hotel reviews or jokes about celebrities or whatever. If I actually libel someone (under proper libel laws, not the UK’s libel laws) then someone can get a court order to ask the identity provider to reveal the digital identity that they were provided with (this, of course, may in some circumstances be another pseudonym).

Here’s a simple example: let’s say that my mobile operator were to give me the identity “citizendave”. I go around logging in to various web sites as citizendave using the mobile handset as part of a 2FA process. Now suppose I log in somewhere and post a libel. The target goes to court and gets an order: this is delivered to O2 (digitally-signed by the Attorney General, naturally) and O2 will then return my name and billing address. Without the court order, cryptography means that no-one can find out who citizendave is. This seems like a reasonable accommodation.

By the way, this is a serious issue – it’s not all about people writing abusive hotel reviews. A couple of years ago Bob Gourley, the former CTO of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, summed the issue up as fundamental and important question about the future identity infrastructure. He said:

We must have ways to protect anonymity of good people, but not allow anonymity of bad people. This is going to be much harder to do than it is to say. I believe a structure could be put in place, with massive engineering, where all people are given some means to stay anonymous, but when a certain key is applied, their cloak can be peeled back.

[From� A CTO analysis: Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom | IT Leadership | TechRepublic.com]

What should be done? I saw this in a comment on an article about the internet and anonymity.

If we create a technology that allows one person, in the privacy of his living room, to create multiple identities to ruin a person or business, then we should create a legal mechanism to allow victims with the same ease to stop it.

[From� Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet - NYTimes.com]

I think this is, essentially, correct. I was listening BBC Radio 5 yesterday and there was a story about a woman whose life was ruined by an ex-boyfriend impersonating her online (it’s not that difficult to pretend to be someone on IM or whatever) and how hard it was for her (or the police) to stop it. So there is a real need to get on and so something about this but not in the privacy-destroying North Korean-style “you have to show a passport to log on” way that will lead to disaster.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

Now, one interesting question is… why? Why do Facebook ban under-13s? I mean why not under-18s? or under-12s? I mean 13 sounds rather arbitrary and there’s no obvious reason for it that springs to mind. So I began to look for a rational reason for this, thinking that it was a Facebook policy. But it isn’t. The reason for this abitrary and capricious age boundary is, as I should have suspected, a consequence of government regulation of the interweb tubes.

Internet companies have set up the rules against under-age users because they must comply with the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), passed in 1998, which says web sites that collect information from children younger than 13 must obtain parental consent.

Obtaining that consent is complex and expensive, so companies like Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, reject anyone who tries to sign up using an age below 13.

[From� Facebook Users Who Are Under Age Raise Concerns - NYTimes.com]

Unusually, across the spectrum of wise political steering in cyberspace, this legislation has not turned out precisely how the politicians and lobbyists intended.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act is a well-intentioned piece of legislation with unintended consequences for parents, educators, and the public writ large. It has stifled innovation for sites focused on children and its implementations have made parenting more challenging.

[From� danah boyd | apophenia » Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule]

I realise that Facebook-13 seems like a very particular and specific issue, but I think it is entirely representative of a class of problems in the new, online world. The way that people talk about this issue illustrates—I would at least postulate—how they think about stuff like online identity at a deep level and is a rather useful guide to technologists and legislators.

In Victoria’s fifth-period honors English class, all 32 students said they had faked their birth year to gain access to one site or another… Jerry Ng, Victoria’s 14-year-old cousin, agreed. “It’s one thing to lie to a person,” he said. “But this is lying to a computer.”

[From� Facebook Users Who Are Under Age Raise Concerns - NYTimes.com]

I love this comment, which is utterly revealing about how the so-called “screenagers” think about the world. A new ethics, discontinuous to our pre-post-industrial moral paradigm. Talking of which, perhaps an alternative to a sophisticated modern identity management system and the new mental models to with it is simply to clear the plebs off the playing field.

The Pope has warned of the dangers of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, saying that communication between people online must not stop face-to-face conversations.

[From� Pope warns Facebook can’t replace human contact - Telegraph]

There’s a heritage to this kind of pedagogical panic.

Similar concerns arose in the 18th century, when newspapers became more common. The French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit.

[From� A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. - By Vaughan Bell - Slate Magazine]

God knows what he would make to the newspapers I saw at Woking train station this morning. The front pages included a splash about whether bread is bad for you, voyeuristic photographs up a female pop star’s dress (I think she was a pop star – I didn’t recognise the name or, for that matter, anything else) and something about the X-Factor. All this at time when the eurozone is in crisis and people are being machine-gunned on the streets of Syria. But back to Facebook.

Whether Facebook is responding to changing social norms or, in fact, leading the charge is an unresolved question

[From� FT.com / FT Magazine - Facebook’s grand plan for the future]

This is very important question. I think that people are disoriented about post-industrial society and confused about the fractal online/offline (or� virtual/mundane) boundary. Facebook provides a way to think about some of these things. I don’t think it’s right to say that it it “leading” the change but I think it is fair to say that until a new model emerges, Facebook will continue to provide a kind of substitute. I think that we should have an identity infrastructure that does not have a mundane analogue, where you can prove that you are an adult or a child without disclosing who you are and that this should be the basic test of fitness of any proposed solution. At the moment, Facebook doesn’t provide this, because it’s still trapped in industrial age identity thinking.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

I don’t want to be friends with my bank—after all, I’m a typical consumer so I hate banks—but I do want to be friends with my bank account. Why can’t Barclays let me friend my current account so I can see its status updates like “Premium card fee £10.00”, “Direct Debit British Gas £37.85” and “Counter Credit £5.00” and so forth?

[From� Friends and relations]

This is a point that I amplified in Retail Banker Interactive, finishing up with plea.

So a plea to my account, card and service providers: I don’t want to be friends with you, because you are corporations and not mates, but I do want to be friends with my stuff: my money, my cards, my phone. How hard can it be?

[From� Social media is not just another communication channel - Blogs - Retail Banker Interactive]

A discussion about this continued over drinks, and I am indebted to David Harris from� salesforce.com for bringing a fascinating example to my attention. Apparently, Toyota are going to have a system whereby you can be friends with your car, which is a great idea.

For example, if an EV or PHV is running low on battery power, Toyota Friend would notify the driver to re-charge in the form of a “tweet”-like alert. In addition, while Toyota Friend will be a private social network, customers can choose to extend their communication to family, friends, and others through public social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

[From� Toyota USA Newsroom | Salesforce.com and Toyota Form Strategic Alliance to Build ‘Toyota Friend’ Social Network for Toyota Customers and Their Cars]

So your friends could be friends with your car too. You might wonder why anyone would want to do this, but consider this: my sister has borrowed my wife’s car for a couple of days while she goes looking for another car, so it would be great if my sister could be friends with my wife’s car (and it would make sense for me to be friends with my wife’s car and vice versa) for a time.

What I’m not sure about is if I would want these connections to be in my hilariously-entitled “real name” or via a network like Facebook. I’m not paranoid, but I don’t want to be bombarded with crap all the time because Facebook has noticed that one of my brake pads is wearing a little thin and has sold this information to a hundred different brake pad companies around the world. And I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before some guy tracks down and murders his ex-girlfriend because she forget he was friends with her car so knows where she is.

There’s a layer of infrastructure missing here and I hope that the Cabinet Office’s Identity Assurance Programme that we were discussing yesterday is going to take this into account. They’ve finally got a budget so I hope that some of the input from the Working Groups can now be acted on.

If this sounds esoteric, it isn’t. It’s a real issue that should be taken seriously as input to the deployment of devices right now. Here’s a straightforward example from Rob Bratby.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

One prediction says social commerce will top $30 billion globally by 2015 with Facebook-generated sales one of the primary drivers.

[From Infographic: The history of F-commerce | SMI]

There are many different ways that financial services organisations can exploit this. A good example, to my mind, is the way in which Amex works with Foursquare.

Just after announcing that it passed 10 million users, location-based check-in service Foursquare has said it is partnering with American Express to give members even better deals when they check in at merchants’ stores across the country.

[From Foursquare partners with American Express for deal check-ins | VentureBeat]

This is a terrific proposition and it's well implemented (through statement credits, so no coupons or vouchers or anything are needed). And, to follow this example, Amex also has a Facebook pages where its large number of fans can come to learn about products and services, share with the community of card holders and so on. Great stuff. And it isn't only financial services organisations that are integrating themselves into social media to create new kinds of social commerce.

That is because the well-known mobile service provider is now allowing its customers to log on to Facebook to purchase phone credit.

[From O2 details new contactless payment technique]

Wow, that's pretty interesting.

Pre-paid subscribers will now be able to access a secure app on the social networking website, where they will put in credit card details in order to purchase top ups.

[From O2 details new contactless payment technique]

Credit card details? Not Facebook credits? But you get the picture. Something like Facebook can be used to create a more intimate transactional environment without having to develop software, making it easy for consumers to "friend" and "like" and so forth. Personally, I don't find this sort of thing particularly appealing because to me it's the wrong kind of social relationship: I want something more granular.

Here's what I mean. I don't want to be friends with my bank—after all, I'm a typical consumer so I hate banks—but I do want to be friends with my bank account. Why can't Barclays let me friend my current account so I can see its status updates like "Premium card fee £10.00", "Direct Debit British Gas £37.85" and "Counter Credit £5.00" and so forth? I quite like the text messages that Barclays sends me but would prefer something more immediate and more detailed (I often call this "streaming commerce") so that I can make decisions and respond.

Similarly, I don't especially want to be friends with MBNA, but I do want to be friends with my MBNA American Express card. If i see a status about about my payment being use, that would be really useful. If I see a status update from my card that appears to have gone on holiday to Kazakhstan while I'm in Peckham, I can press a button somewhere and get straight through to lost and stolen cards. I wouldn't mind if the status updates where now and then promotional messages instead of transaction reports, that would be handy. It would due like my friend telling me that there's double reward points in Sainsbury's today, so something like that. I'm using "friend" generically, of course, I don't mean to imply that Facebook is the one and only way to implement a social media strategy.

Facebook usage in the UK fell nearly 4pc in July to its lowest level since 2009, sparking concerns that the social network has hit its peak and may be declining in popularity.

[From Facebook usage falls to three-year low - Telegraph]

I don't use Facebook that much—it's really for sharing with my brother and sister, other family members and a few old friends—and I've not got a crystal ball to see whether we'll still be using it in a couple of years.

Many of the smartest people I know are leaving Facebook as well. I predict we’ll see many people leaving over the coming months and adopting Twitter.

[From The Facebook Exodus and the Future of Human Communication « Far Beyond The Stars | Cyborgs, second selves and cybernetic yogis]

My idea would work even better with Twitter. Suppose Barclays knew my twitter name—maybe they could ask me when I log in for home banking and get permission to send tweets to me—and connected it to my bank account. Now, whenever Barclays gets a new follower on twitter it can scan it's customer database to find out if that twitter name belongs to a customer. If it does, they can starting sending out all status changes as Direct Messages (DMs). That would be simple and great.

I'd love to follow my John Lewis MasterCard on Twitter in this way instead of having to log in to find out what it's been up to. Since I use Twitter all day and every day anyway, it would be a much better channel for payment products to develop a more intimate relationship with me. And think of the practical benefits: if I get a tweet from my debit card telling me it's just been used to withdraw money from an ATM in Belarus, I can call Barclays right away to block it from further misbehaviour. This doesn't seem terribly complex: all Barclays need to know is my twitter name and then it can use the Twitter API to post tweets and only allow me to follow them.

If I could follow my transactional instruments, I could also (in time) feed their tweets, status updates, notifications and so on into other software for mash-ups. I don't know what kind of mash-ups – I'm not smart enough for that – but I'm sure there are people out there who could do great stuff with the data. So a plea to my account, card and service providers: I don't want to be friends with you, because you are corporations and not mates, but I do want to be friends with my stuff: my money, my cards, my phone. How hard can it be?