There are some good thoughts on online identity and people search by Fred Stutzman on the ClaimID blog. Certainly a crucial point is that search engines aren’t able to distinguish between different people of the same name; users still have to make claims to provide a more complete identity:
The approach that seems to be popular in identity search is a hybrid of search + claiming. Knowing that models will never fully disambiguate or find any one individual, the search engines allow individuals to claim related results, creating a dossier of sorts.
I also agree with him that identity should be decentralised. Of course, I can start aggregating all relevant data in one place, at one company; but that data should be portable because giving away my online identity to one company is not really an idea I feel comfortable about. Oddly enough, most people’s online identity is already controlled by one big company, Google, and they don’t have much control over it.
So hopefully there will be some innovating and more sophisticated concepts about online identity to offer people new solutions and more alternatives.
Tags: Fred Stutzman, Google, identity search, online identity, Online Identity There, people new solutions, Search engines