#UOSM2008 - Topic 2 - Summary

This topic has been extremely interesting to research and even more interesting to read about other people’s experiences with managing online identities.

From what I have read the concept of having multiple online identities is a very common occurrence amongst the student population. Everyone seems to have at least one type of profile or another. Key topics of conversation included the idea of managing your online identity as a whole by having a variety of services that reflect your personality online. By using a consistent name and (pp) profile picture you can establish a presence on the web relatively quickly, and almost brand yourself from there. The benefits of having this might be professional in the form of getting a job from a well-managed LinkedIn profile, or gaining something as simple as a 50+ likes status!

Discussions also leaned towards privacy concerns, in particular company’s gathering/mining information about online users, and then selling this information to other companies. The data protection act and online fraud springs to mind, however legally there is nothing technically wrong with this, only ethical concerns. I believe that ethical concerns as opposed to legal ones will start to play a bigger roles in the coming years with regards to online identifies.

Security concerns for the individual were also raised; having multiple accounts all connected to the Internet with similar passwords is a huge risk and can result in many of your online identities being compromised at once. This is more and more common, as services such as Google have the option of signing in onto multiple services. For example my Google account is linked to my Flickr and Sound Cloud accounts, as well as G-mail, Google drive and Google calendar. So theoretically if someone guessed my Google password they would have access to all these services at once.

Fortunately for me Google provides a two-step verification process, which involves texting the me when there account is being used on a new computer. This helps prevent the issues I mentioned above. For anyone who’s interested this link can help

http://www.google.com/landing/2step/?utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-sk&utm_medium=ha

In conclusion I think there is plenty more discussion to have on this topic, the lack of knowledge that users have on privacy issues is discouraging and I’m sure the line between legality and being ethical will continue to blur.