[Dave Birch] Bankwatch reminded me to finish this post.  Some research in the US has confirmed the anecdotal evidence that young persons who forget their MySpace password are just as likely to make a new account as fret over their lost friends or painstakingly constructed homepage decorations.  The research, by Danah Boyd, indicates that this behaviour is representative of a more general attitude, that  ‘many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places’, and she has noted that for young people an online profile is ‘not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment’.  As Bill Thompson pointed out, maybe it’s another age-related disconnect.  I don’t go as far as Bill in having the same login name for every service I sign up for, but I do select from a very small set of lgin names (work-me, home-me, nice-blog-me, nasty-blog-me and so forth) but perhaps kids are simply extending the natural teenage experimentation with identity into the virtual world.

Technorati Tags: identity

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] There’s been obvious interest in PayPal’s decision to move to hardware-based 2FA and issue Verisign authentication devices to account holders.  The hardware tokens are in the form of keyfobs that display an ever-changing (well, every 30 seconds) one-time password in the form of six digit number. It will cost US$5 for personal PayPal accounts, but will be free for business customers.  The driver for 2FA is clear: research released by IT security firm Sophos in August 2006 found that over 75% of all phishing e-mails target users of PayPal or its parent company eBay.  PayPal spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt told reporters the new device will provide customers with "another layer of protection" so if a fraudulent party got hold of a person’s username and password, they still wouldn’t be able to get into the PayPal account. This is all good, but one must remember that if a newspaper reports "the device is designed to protect customers against fraudulent phishing scams", customers might well here "the device prevents phishing" which (as Digital Identity denizens are well aware) is simply not true.  Token-based 2FA does not prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

Technorati Tags: business, identity

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] The future trends consultancy Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve has predicted the formation of a whole new type of consumer identity over the next few years: the ‘New Networked Self’, based on technological advances that connect people in an unlimited, yet potentially intimate, way.  As a result of technologies such as internet-based social networks and consumer generated content, the company believes that consumers are increasingly turning away from the ego-driven self-aggrandizement that characterised the old era of hyper-consumption.  Instead, the New Networked Self is far more ecologically aware than its predecessor, with the consumer seeing himself or herself as a tiny-but-instrumental part of a much larger picture that’s constantly changing.  Personally, I think that the digital identity world should be listening to people from the brand world, because brand is one of the key missing ingredients in the digital identity mix.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.