I picked up an old-fashioned print copy of Wired the other day when I was at Stansted Airport. I quite enjoy reading about web topics in print, mainly because it gives my eyes a rest from the glow of the VDU. Strangely though, I find the American style of breaking up articles into two section, as Wired does, to really detract from the experience.
Anyway, one article caught my attention, in the current climate of internet ids and convergence between online personas and offline identities. Hasan Elahi was detained by the FBI after stepping off a U.S. flight due to suspicions he was a terrorist. Luckily, he’s actually a Rutgers professor and artist, but it led to a web-based project for him.
On TrackingTransience.net, Hasan details everything he does, and everywhere he goes. Meals, purchases, flights, it’s all there. And it allows him the perfect alibi, should anyone question his whereabouts and motives. And funnily enough, his server log shows hits from the Pentagon and the Secretary of Defense among others.
He predicts a day when so many people are posting so much online it puts Big Brother out of business.
it’s an interesting idea. Particularly when there is such a threat of identity theft and fraud online. But if your bank can see you’re in the newsagents in Cambridge when your card is being used online from a PC in New York, or in person in Manchester, it’ll make innocence easier to prove – if banks etc accept the evidence, which will take time for them to grasp the concept.
The only flaw is that it requires you to be absolutely honest. And that’s the case with all this convergence. If you’re in a relationship, for example, and you get approached by someone online who flirts, having all your info in one place could lead to huge problems. If you record anything that has broken any rules, then you’ve invited yourself to be caught. And what happens if you’re an attractive 17 year old girl rather than a 35-year-old male, and you try the same technique?
There will always be risks to every decision, and there will always be flaws. But Hasan has shown that rather than worrying about having your privacy invaded and spending your life paranoid and trying to cloak yourself, perhaps it’s more effective to just put everything on show and take what comes.
