One of the areas of research that I am involved in with Naumi is the future of what we are calling The Pervasive Personal Identity and the exciting possibilities and troubling potential that come from our rapidly-increasing digital footprints.

When most of us think of our digital profile, we think of the footprint that is created by our active maintenance – à la Facebook or LinkedIn.  On these networks, either we or those we “know” are responsible for maintaining our rich user profile that comes to define us in the digital world.  There is tremendous power in these networks for facilitating both our social and professional lives, but one of the associated challenges is that there are so many of them – how can one keep track of them all?  If you have maintained a consistent online handle, things can be much easier, but for those of us who haven’t, there are emerging tools such as UnHub that act as simple aggregators, allowing users to create a single destination where their many profiles can be found i.e. http://unhub.com/richardbranson without having to purchase and set up an independent domain.

For better or for worse, there is also another very important level of profile maintenance that is taking place in the background, requiring very little effort on our part – passive maintenance.  Programs such as ChoicePoint have become important destinations for comprehensive personal information by aggregating data from a number of public sources and privately held databases.  By serving as mass aggregators, with over 17 billion records in ChoicePoint’s case, such organizations are able to sell profile information for the purposes of insurance, reference checks (tenant, employee…) and many other uses. Continue…