foe romeo

My teenage identity activists

About a year ago now, MSN UK implemented a change that prevented people from finding profiles of under-18s, unless they knew their direct screen name. I wrote about it at the time and since then my blog has been used intermittently as an alternative member directory.  Here's a sample:

i have any 1 got msn if u have plz give me ur addy and we will have fun chatting i am 14 and i am a girl from wales
Posted by: sophie at February 9, 2005 07:26 PM

joke i am 12
Posted by: sophie at February 9, 2005 07:28 PM

dani give me ur msn addy and we can chat and eny body else if they want is every 1 here send me ur addys plz plz plz plz plz
Posted by: sophie at February 9, 2005 07:30 PM

hia am so brd at da mo n ardli any1 is on msn im 14 n am a gal xxxx add me if u wnt
Posted by: alex at March 24, 2005 06:15 PM

hi do u want to talk
Posted by: suzanne at April 8, 2005 02:19 PM

I'd been deleting the personal information as it's posted but that felt a bit too mean, so now I've decided just switch comments off on that post.

Remember my name

^ From the site of husk mit navn, a street artist in Copenhagen whose tag translates as 'Remember my name' (via jill/txt). Like Jill, I particularly enjoy the idea of fliers posted around the city, with (unsigned) tear-off drawings instead of phone numbers. You can take the work, just 'husk mit navn'.

This reminded me of some recent statistics for Creative Commons licenses (via Matt), which show that 97% of licenses created so far require attribution. (67% of licenses restrict commercial use and 33% restrict derivative works.)

Identifying people rather than boxes

TV-Card is the first attempt (that I know of) to identify individual users to a digital TV service:

Real "pocket-sized televisual hard disks", the TV-Card smart cards make it possible to store the personal data of the viewer on a secured and portable support. They offer moreover the advertisers and editors the possibility to identify and to segment their audience/customers and to target not the household, but each member who composes it.

Some possible models:

Smart card giving access to privileged services: fan-club, soccer team, department stores...

Personalized smart cards: parental smart card (restricts access to X rated programs), specific access (banks, administrations…).

The potential for Personal Video Recorders is obvious, and the use of a smart card ensures compatibility with "the external world (PCs, interactive kiosks, electronic payment terminals, payment systems…)".

I can't comment on the implementation - I'm sure games consoles still do a much better job of this kind of thing - but it's about time someone tried it for digital TV.

(Found via Broadband Bananas)

Business card trading games

^See the original here

Finally, people have started making business card-trading games. Life resembles Pokemon - folks at conferences trading cards... These particular OK/Cancel cards celebrate contemporary usability wonks - interaction design experts. The designers... took an open-ended approach to the gameplay - each of the cards has four attributes, different for each usability designer. But not specified within any ruleset! So people can make up their own game to go along with the scenario.

From game girl advance

Portable players

Terra Nova muses on a suggestion made by Peter Molyneux at the Game Developers' Conference:

'Wouldn't it be nice if in the future player profiles could be exchanged between games. Somehow games might collect, save, and then share player meta-info with other games. Then games could then adapt and configure themselves using this information to enhance the player experience.'

On the face of it, Peter's idea seems interesting, especially teleported into MMOG space. Could there be a universe of confederated MMOGs linked by shared player meta information? But why stop with just meta-information, why not also the outright transfer of characters?

Would this lower the barrier of entry of players to participate in small MMOGs and thereby encourage a vibrant, innovative, game-design culture? This smacks of nuttiness for those of you who played AD&D and can recall endless Game Master (GM) "multi-universe" arguments (how to move characters between different GM universes), but is it a bridge that needs to be crossed?

Just enough ID

Six Apart's TypeKey seems to be a suitably light (and ethical) identity solution for the blogosphere:

TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.

Why should I use TypeKey?

TypeKey helps ensure that people who comment on a site have a verified identity, keeping conversations on track and helping to prevent abusive or offensive content (comment spam) from being posted. Sites that enable TypeKey have better accountability for the content that's being published.

As a TypeKey user, you get your own free TypeKey Profile Page, displaying only the information you choose to share. Those who are interested in finding out more about the person behind the comments on a site can visit the identity page to see what information is publicly available. You can even publish a TypeKey Profile Page while remaining completely anonymous.

You share only the information you choose to ("You can even publish a TypeKey Profile Page while remaining completely anonymous"), it's free, and Six Apart won't share your details without your permission. While seeking to tackle comment spam, this service is also a great opportunity for commenters who don't have a blog or personal site of their own to take some ownership of their online identity and make themselves known to the blogs they read and comment on. A wonderfully sociable solution.

Showing similar restraint is Maciej Cegłowski and Joshua Schachter's LOAF (via Many-to-Many):

LOAF creates and maintains a database of all your correspondents, defined as people to whom you have sent email at least once...

When you receive an email from an address you have not previously written to, LOAF checks to see if the email address is known to any of your existing correspondents. This essentially sorts incoming email into three categories:

Mail from complete strangers
These are people whom you do not know, and who are also unknown to your correspondents.

Mail from partial strangers
These are people you have never sent email to, but who have gotten email from at least one of your own correspondents. This email may deserve more attention, since at least one of your correspondents took the time to write back to the person.

Mail from people you know
This last category consists of people whom you have written to before. Presumably this is email you're most interested in, unless it's another forward from your mom.

Mail [from partial strangers] can be further classified by counting how many correspondents you and the sender have in common.

I haven't played with either yet but hope they're as good as they sound.

LiveJournal now produces FOAF

So LiveJournal, a journals service primarily used by young people is now auto-generating FOAF. My LiveJournal FOAF file contains all of my interests, my friends, my URL and date of birth! I didn't request this and wasn't notified of the update. I know that LiveJournal is probably doing this with the best of intentions - in the same spirit as their decision to publish LiveJournal statistics - but I have some concerns about the auto-generation of FOAF for younger users. Do we really want to give their details away more freely, or allow new services to build around the friend lists they've built within the semi-private environment of LiveJournal?

ETech: Social software for children

My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group’s qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.

While the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children’s safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children). I then very briefly presented my work-in-progress on a site for children who collect things (design-only so far) - WikiWorm. Thanks to Matt for his design work and Deborah for her delightfully wriggly worm logo.

My motivation is to ensure that children continue to have the right to be present in public; to enjoy the benefits of social software and the good social capital it can generate, and to have a public voice. Digital spaces are particularly important given the social context in the UK, where a child playing freely outside is less common and teens don’t feel welcome in public space.

My presentation (with additional notes) is now available for download - sorry for the delay. Many other ETech 2004 presentations are available on the O'Reilly conference site and session notes are on their wiki. There is also talk of a ConConUK, which I'll definitely make it to if it's on the 23rd.

I hope to share some of my emerging thoughts about this year's conference here, as soon as they've emerged ;-)

Writing the self

In his Guardian review of Jerome Bruner's Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life Galen Strawson challenges the claim that "we create or invent the self specifically by 'writing' and 'storying' it":

Is any of this true? Do we create ourselves? Is the narrativity view a profound and universal insight into the human condition? It's a partial truth at best, true enough for some, completely false for others. There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future. On the other side, the non-narrators: those who live life in a fundamentally non-storytelling fashion, who may have little sense of, or interest in, their own history, nor any wish to give their life a certain narrative shape. In between lies the great continuum of mixed cases.

How did the narrativist orthodoxy arise? I suspect that it is because those who write about it and treat it as a universal truth about the human condition tend, like Bruner, to be profoundly narrative types themselves. The narrators control the current discussion, in fact, and assume that the way things are for them is the way they are for everyone else...

I'm mostly in agreement with Galen Strawson's argument as it's confirmed by much of the research I've participated in around the question of 'what makes you you'. So many of the people interviewed (particularly mothers of young children) simply didn't know where to start. It wasn't something they had time to think about in the main. And when they did speak about it, it was largely in terms of their mothering role and the identities of others (especially their children).

Interestingly, most of them enjoyed the exercise once they were prompted, and as they were being paid to participate, perhaps it felt less self-indulgent than it would have otherwise. As it turned out, they had many strong, idiosyncratic interests but they weren't tied up in conscious storytelling about the self.

FOAF and people search

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. This thinking was only partly prompted by the discovery of my Google shame. (When I was at Digital ID World 2003, Tom Coates broke the bad news to me: the first search result for "Fiona Romeo" in Google was the least flattering picture of me, ever. Other results included a credit on an INXS fanzine I helped produce when I was a teenager; a petition that ostentatiously describes its signatories as ‘Australia’s brightest young expats’; an unsubscribe request; and debating credits.)

Anyway, this experience - and many others, less trivial ;-) - made me think about the ownership of my own identity. And this is where I've got to so far...

People are not content but there is often content written about them. When someone is searching for someone else by name they are interested in one of two things (I think). Either they want to contact that person, or they want to learn more about them. In the first case, they want to find a 'primary' result for that person that contains their public contact details, e.g. an email address or personal site URL. Their FOAF file would be perfect in this case. In the second, they're satisfied with whatever documents containing that name have the most Google juice. There should be a way to differentiate between those two searches.

I should be able to create a FOAF file which becomes the primary search result when someone searches for 'foaf Fiona Romeo' in a search engine, or when someone types 'FionaRomeo.person' (or something similar) into a web address bar.

Content about me is still valid and of interest and should be displayed as a distinct set of search results (within the same page).

Where there are many results for a name - because full names are not often unique (although mine seems to be) - results could be filtered by friends or location. And a 'profile' could be validated by reciprocal links between friends. ‘I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it.’

Maybe it's just me who wants this level of control? Maybe most other people are just that bit more relaxed than me...

See also: Anil Dash's post about the growing ubiquity and simplicity of FOAF

Google to focus on ID now?

Eric Norlin predicts that they will:

10. Google gets into the Identity business. While Google won't 'become an identity company,' they will get into the business of identity. Talk has been swirling in the weblog world for quite some time about RSS feeds, blogs, self-asserted identities and the like, and in 2004 Google will become one of the first companies to capitalise on this sector with an identity focus.

From Digital Identity World's Predictions for Digital Identity in 2004

See also: My earlier posts, Google by ID and Google and the nature of things

Update: Or maybe those waiting for a big play in the ID space should be watching Amazon instead, as it is increasingly comfortable with the idea of 'Amazon as platform'

Name check

According to AC Grayling, emotions of self assessment involve beliefs about what other people think of us, or of the people or things we identify with. There's probably as much anxiety as boredom at play when people spend their time:

Counting friends

Picture-searching their first name

Taking quizzes

Tinyurling their name

Checking their Link Cosmos

Shaping their playlists

Googling for themselves

Self assessment is just a bit too immediate online.

Posted at 02:48 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

13 November 2003

Gadget for the (sensibly) paranoid

Very pleased to see a shredder included in TIME Magazine's Coolest Inventions 2003:

Dumpster divers who make a living from personal information pulled from the trash don't care what form it comes in—paper, plastic or floppy disc. So why not play it safe? The MD 100 Media Destroyer is a paranoid's dream come true. It flattens raised numbers on old credit and ATM cards before cutting them to ribbons. It shreds a CD in about four seconds, reducing it to shards too small to be used for any kind of data recovery. It slices right through floppy discs, metal clips and all. You have to fold letter-size paper before feeding it through the 5-in. slot, but at least you don't have to remove the staples first.

Not paranoid enough to want one? Read up on identity theft and you might be.

Posted at 11:20 AM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

26 October 2003

DIDW: Identity theft

The Guardian published a UK-focussed account of identity theft this weekend:

In this modern commodity world, your most valuable commodity is not your posh car, sharp computer or show-off mobile phone. It's you. Your ID. Because the modern commodity world works not on currency, but on trust in individual identity. Trade takes place on the basis of looking at your identity and deciding how safe you are to deal with. So, if someone is able to steal your trustworthy ID, a booty-store of cash, goods and services, procured in your name and without your knowledge, is laid wide open to them.

The Guardian article is very good at recognising the personal aggravation caused by identity crime:

Such aggravation is the result of it being down to you, the one whose ID is stolen, to clear your name with each organisation with which the identity thief gets you involved - and not just with the one credit reference agency. In this sense, you could be said to be doing the job of the credit reference agency for them.

and also the greater risk:

As trust breaks down between consumers and organisations, more and more groups will fall into a high-risk category and become disenfranchised. The young, recent migrants, expats, anyone without a credit history will find it impossible to obtain the goods and services that we have all come to expect as a basic right.

Digital ID World had a talk on identity crime from Bob Bond, of the US Secret Service. I particularly enjoyed Bob’s unabashed usage of phrases like ‘bad guys’ and ‘take them down’ but also appreciated his clear and concise ID theft primer. My notes follow…

Bob Bond (US Secret Service), Identity Crime

Identity crime is the theft or misuse of personal or financial identifiers, in order to gain something of value and/or facilitate other crimes.

Identity theft is usually associated with other crimes (e.g. narcotics trafficking, mortgage fraud, terrorism) and used as a facilitator – financing or anonymity – for these activities.

We’ve seen a proliferation of financially-motivated identity crimes because the:

Start-up costs are so low:

Information on different schemes is readily available on the internet and in books, newspapers and movies

The required equipment can be bought or leased, often with ‘no money down’

Profit potential is high

Gains higher

Businesses are willing to absorb ‘acceptable levels’ of fraud loss

Proceeds easier to launder and conceal

Risk of successful investigation and prosecution is low

Detected well after they’re committed, often go unreported and often never investigated

Declinations are frequent, sentences tend to be light

Victims don’t suffer a ‘personal injury’

USSS position on identity crimes:

Increasingly trans-national organised criminal enterprises

Increasingly diversifying into more serious offences, e.g. narcotics trafficking, extortion…

Compromise US and global economic infrastructures

Reduce corporate productivity and lead to higher costs for consumers

Create an atmosphere of suspicion

Identity theft – ‘how to’

Stealing a victim’s trash ('dumpster diving')

Stealing a wallet

Shoulder surfing or eavesdropping

Obtaining information through a ruse such as a phone scam or internet scheme

Stealing information from a victim’s home or car

Stealing from your mail or from mail in transit (‘steal me’ flags)

Additionally, ‘breeder documents’ can be downloaded from the internet and used to acquire legitimate documents like drivers’ licenses. (Seven of the 10 terrorists responsible for September 11th used this method.)

These criminals can obtain personal identifiers of individuals with good credit by:

Recruiting individuals who have access to other people’s personal information in the course of their employment

Stealing documents from businesses that contain personal information (e.g. rental contracts, loan applications, personnel records, medical records)

This information is then used to obtain credit in victim’s name. The information can also be used for an account takeover, by filing a change of address and requesting the issuance of convenience cheques.

The victim is usually oblivious to the fraud until they have a loan or credit application denied, or they’re contacted by a bank or collection agency.

Also see:

The US Federal Trade Commission's Identity theft resource (including their recent report (pdf), which contains very interesting stats - e.g. ‘Only 9% of victims knew that they had lost their personal information because they had lost a wallet or were victims of theft’)

Posted at 09:49 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

24 October 2003

DIDW: Mydentity

Doc Searls has posted the slides from his Digital ID World keynote: mydentity, ourdentity, theirdentity. My (belated) notes from his talk follow...

Andre Durand first described identity as having three tiers, each concerned with different kinds of relationships:

T1. Assumed or personal (our relationship with ourselves)
T2. Assigned or corporate (companies' relationships with us)
T3. Abstracted or marketing (companies' guesswork about us)

Tier 1 - the personal - is central. Tiers 2 and 3 work from the outside in - companies control how they relate to us (and ask for our consent for T2 only). And they're isolated silos; few are open to opportunities suggested by who we are or what we want.

Our wallets are T2 habitats (with their credit and store cards, loyalty cards, employee cards...). Our mailboxes are T3 habitats, assaulted by companies who are not on to the possibility of connected demand.

What happens when T1 gets equal power in T2 relationships?

Relationships become 2-way, real

T3 goes away

Opportunities open up when you allow participation of demand in the process of supply.

The internet created and supports new market conditions through opportunities to connect and transact. But also opportunities to talk and relate.

Networked markets get smarter faster than most companies.

Where are we - as an industry - now? Talking to ourselves, in IdentoLatin. We use the word market to mean many different things but in the beginning markets were markets. They were places where people met to do business and make culture.

Real markets operate at 3 levels:

Relationships

Conversation (in natural markets you find the price in conversation)

Exchange

Yet we still talk in a language of exchange, even when we're talking about relationships, e.g. ‘delivering services’. Markets are relationships and they’re profoundly social. Companies can’t help relating, constantly, with their markets - but they've kept it narrow.

How can we better relate? By cultivating the grassroots.

Root-based translation of Andre’s model:
T1: mydentity
T2: ourdentity
T3: theirdentity

Roots are mydentities, relationships are around ourdentities, theirdentities die from relationship stagnation.

Meanwhile, as farmers we sound like paving contractors.

What do we do with the networked customer? Embrace them if we’re big; enable them if we’re small.

It's easy if you think about what customers want -

Any time

Any place

Anywhere

In the networked world
- and enable that.

Privacy sends all of the energy sideways. If privacy were the only issue we’d never do anything. Look at making business connections in all kinds of ways – customer to customer, supplier to supplier, and welcome relationships initiated by the customer.

Things can happen if demand can express itself simply.

Posted at 01:26 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

21 October 2003

nTAG sleep attacks

Early on during the conference, Whit Diffie hacked his nTAG badge to send a sleep command to any nTAG badge in range, effectively deactivating them. As word spread of the hack, people sought him out to sleep their hated badges. Others were pissed that he was turning off their badges without permission; someone asked at the end of the conference if sending a sleep command constituted an attack (When Sleep Attacks!).

From kottke.org (Thanks Matt)

See also: My thoughts on nTAGs at Digital ID World

Posted at 10:19 AM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

17 October 2003

DIDW: ‘And you can also RFID people…’

It genuinely surprises me how easily some of the presenters here can slip from objects to people, or people to objects. It can only be because they’re answering very difficult technical - rather than social - questions.

But I’m left gasping.

I was sat by Akma at dinner on Wednesday night, so had the opportunity to talk it through a little with someone who offers a more personal (indeed, spiritual) perspective. Akma says that digital identity will only be adopted (or accepted) if it’s created in a way that doesn’t offend. It must be intelligible to people in terms of the way they understand their identity, and situated in relationships.

Some of the things we talk about here – e.g. phone numbers as names – could easily alienate non-tech folk.

Akma also alluded to the way some religious beliefs might preclude a wholehearted acceptance of some of what we’re pushing.

This thinking recalls danah boyd and her insistence on registration forms that don’t relegate women to second-class citizenship, and David Weinberger asking for profiles that don’t do damage to the truth of his identity by making explicit things that are otherwise not.

The profiling process must match the mental model of the people using it. Not so that it’s usable; not so that people can complete the pre-defined tasks… but so that they want to complete these tasks. Or at least wouldn’t feel that completing them violated their sense of self. This is a psychological, emotional challenge; not just a technical or regulatory one. The same ID solution can’t simply be ported from objects to people, or people to objects. Or, at least, most people wouldn’t accept that it could be.

I think there’s a lot to be learnt from the recent revolution in UK banking, which transformed the mortgage and investment models to allow Islamic customers to fully participate in the personal finance sector without having to do violence to their beliefs.

Posted at 03:03 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

16 October 2003

DIDW: nTAG

The nTAG - kindly given to all conference attendees - is a useful reminder of Marc Smith’s refrain that ‘social interfaces are built by anti-social people’.

It embarrasses me. My interests and areas of expertise had to be selected from a pre-defined list, which didn't include my real interests. So I just chose the closest approximation but now when it uses those interests to introduce me, I just want to cry 'no, no, no, that's not me at all!'

What would I have played with? A device that recognised the person I was talking to (by name) – nTAG does this – but also let me take a quick snap of them. Maybe it would also be fun to send it straight to my blog with a short comment or conversational keyword. That would make my interactions with people more memorable for me and perhaps also useful to others.

Ah, I think I want us to have camera phones with identities. Maybe linked to foaf files…

See also: Alice's thoughts on nTAG

Posted at 11:35 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Digital ID World 2003

I'm at this year's Digital ID World conference, with Alice. You can follow the proceedings by visiting the conference's blog aggregator, which is pulling in the thoughts of Doc Searls, Marc Canter, Phil Windley, et al... I will be posting my own notes and musings once I've started digesting :-)

Posted at 06:00 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

25 September 2003

Gender correction

If you're going to alphabetize everything else in your sign-up, alphabetize sex. Male / Female is only a clear reminder of who you value in your system. I can deal with the abuse of the term gender, but c'mon now.. give me one good reason for not alphabetizing sex terms other than cultural sexism?

From danah boyd's connected selves

I hadn't noticed it before but I've now requested a fix in the next release of the 'sign-up' product I work on. (We were already OK on the opt-out front.)

Posted at 09:51 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Multiple identities

Now, in addition to the social-network system invitations, many of which require me to register with yet more services and fill out yet more profiles, I am also getting multiple "update your contact information" requests from people using Plaxo, AccuCard (from CardScan), and GoodContacts. Enough! Even Yahoo doesn't seem to know that the people in my groups are the same as those I want to invite (oops, Yahoo canceled its invitation service!), message, or pay using PayDirect...

From Dysfunctional relationships: Social networking systems promise ease and deliver irritability (via Many-to-Many)

Posted at 09:34 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

08 September 2003

High score

October's (print) edition of The Edge plots the development of persistent public identities in arcade gaming.

Initially, a 'hi-score' was simply a measure of the player's performance against the machine. In 1978, Star Fire was the first coin-op to incorporate entry of a three-letter signature onto a hi-score table. This pitted players against each other but the score table was reset as soon as the machine was switched off. In 1980, a pinball designer came up with Defender, which incorporated a pinball-style battery back-up memory system to store an 'All-Time Greatest' hi-score table alongside the volatile 'Today's Greatest' list:

Now the classier players could see their scores dominate on an individual machine, in a particular arcade. Non-resetting hi-score tables brought a strange kind of social order to the chirruping chaos of amusement arcades. Localised cults of personality flourished around games, arcades, even towns.

So it's no surprise that online play is now turning to score-based ranking systems:

The beauty of an online hi-score table is, the minute you get a hi-score, you can check your ranking on many levels - among your friends, nationally, internationally...

Microsoft seems to be deploying its Passport thinking in allowing Xbox Live players to have a global identity across all games. When players sign up for the service, they choose a Gamertag that becomes their name in every Live game and buddy list. But because it's Microsoft, it's a closed service.

See also:

Gamasutra's Developing Online Console Games

Xbox Live's Friends and Scorecards feature description

Posted at 07:00 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

28 August 2003

Births, marriage and death

From a quick skim of the Office for National Statistics' Civil Registration: Vital Change paper, it seems that the key changes are:

A central database for recording births, marriages and deaths, which will be linked to create a single 'through life' record and accessed by other government departments to verify the particulars of a 'life event'

The ability to register births, marriages and deaths online, in person or on the phone

Self-completion of the record

Information available 24/7 to individuals via most platforms

Most interesting to me, though, is the move to allow names to be updated:

While continuing to hold the initial information, the Government intends to move away from holding the traditional 'snapshot' of life events towards the concept of a 'living record'. In time, updating the information in a birth record will mean that changes to a person's names, and, potentially, sex will be able to be recorded. It will not be mandatory for changes to be notified...

Currently, once a record has been created, the only corrections that can be made are where it can be shown that an error was made at the time of registration and that this can be established... The final record contains the full original and corrected information which is shown on subsequently issued certificates... In future, changes (to reflect developments after the original record was made) will be made and formally recorded. Documents issued from the records will contain only the information as amended, though all the information will be retained.

They have also introduced an interesting distinction between the 'active population' (records relating to people born in the last 100 years) and historic records. There will be no restrictions on accessing registration information held in historic records. For the 'active population' only occupation, location and cause of death are considered private information.

Posted at 07:06 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

26 July 2003

Roleplayers

A 'role' is generally defined as behaviour appropriate for some situations but not for others. Crying as such is behaviour which cannot be described as a 'role'; crying at a funeral is behaviour which can be so described; it is expected, appropriate, specific to that situation. Much of the study of roles has been a catalogue of what kind of behaviour is appropriate to what kind of situations, and the theories of roles now current are of how society creates definitions of appropriateness. Usually overlooked in such categories, however, is the fact that most roles are not just pantomimes or dumb shows in which people mechanically trot out the right emotional signs at the right place and moment. Roles also involve codes of belief; how much and on what terms people taker seriously their own behaviour, the behaviour of others, and the situations in which they are engaged. Beyond all the cataloguing of how people behave there is the question of what value they place upon 'situation-specific' behaviour. Codes of belief and behaviour together make up a role, and this is exactly what makes it so difficult to study roles historically. For sometimes new patterns of behaviour will continue to be interpreted with old codes of belief, and sometimes the same sort of behaviour will continue over time, even as people arrive at new definitions of what it means.

From Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man

Posted at 08:12 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

17 July 2003

Face paint

Nowhere was the attempt to blot out the individual character of a person more evident than in the treatment of the face. Both men and women used face paint, either red or white, to conceal the natural colour of the skin and any blemishes it might have. Masks came back into fashion, worn by both men and women.

Marking the face with little patches of paint was the final step in obliterating the face. The practice was begun in the 17th century, but only by the 1750’s had it become widespread. In London patches were placed on the right or left side of the face, depending on whether one were Whig or Tory. During the reign of Louis XV, patches were placed to indicate the character of the Parisian: at the corner of the eye stood for passion; center of the cheek, gay; nose, saucy. A murderess was supposed to wear patches on her breasts. The face itself had become a background only, the paper on which these ideograms of abstract character were mounted.

From Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man

Posted at 01:41 PM in Identity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

15 June 2003

Faces before handles

There are a small number of stages that led to successful identification of a familiar person. First, the face had to be recognised as familiar: that is, matched against a record of that person’s facial appearance stored in memory. Second, information about why that face was familiar was retrieved: where the person was known from or what they did for a living. The final stage, and one which was surprisingly prone to error, was retrieving the name of the person.

Lots of other evidence supports this simple three-stage model. For example, if people are asked to make rapid decisions about a series of faces, they are quickest to decide whether or not each face is familiar, a little slower to decide whether or not a face belongs to some occupational group… and slowest of all to decide whether the face belongs to a person with a particular name…

So, one of the most frequently reported problems in person identification is forgetting a person’s name…

Psychological research has shown that the difficulty of remembering names is not because those words which are people’s names are particularly problematic…

The difficulty with naming seems to require an explanation in terms of the kinds of memory locations or structures used to store names compared with other kinds of information… Any task involving name retrieval must take longer than any task involving retrieval of information about identity, simply because name retrieval involves an additional and time-consuming stage. However, the reasons why names - so central to our identities – may be delegated to his subordinate stage in person identification, remains mysterious…

From Vicki Bruce and Andrew Young’s In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face Perception

See also:

Elizabeth Lane Lawley on Face Time

Judith Donath's Mediated Faces

A C Grayling's Your Face or Mine? (writing in The Independent about facial transplants, subscription required)

Vicki Bruce Fleeting Images of Shade: Identifying People Caught on Video (on facial matching)