Michael Zimmer.org

Speaking of my colleague Noëmi Manders-Huits, she is organizing an amazing looking conference on Ethics, Technology and Identity in Delft this June:
Information technology plays an increasingly important role in society and in human lives. Identity Management Technologies (e.g. biometrics, profiling, surveillance), in combination with a variety of identification procedures and personalized services are ubiquitous and pervasive. This calls for careful consideration and design of collecting, mining, storing and use of personal information.
Access, rights, responsibilities, benefits, burdens and risks are apportioned on the basis of identities of individuals. These identities are …

[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz]
This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts on how the rise of so-called Web 2.0 technologies bear on privacy and surveillance studies. After presenting a few examples of unintended consequences of Web 2.0 that bear on privacy and surveillance, I will introduce the term “netaveillance,” which might provide a useful concept around which a more robust theory of …

I am pleased to announce that selected papers from the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” graduate student symposium held at New York University in September have been published in a special issue of First Monday. Here are titles and abstracts:
Identity and Identification in a Networked World
by Tim Schneider and Michael Zimmer
Summary of events and acknowledgments.
Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
by danah boyd
“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network …

Ralf Bendrath has a thoughtful post on Oracle’s recently announced “Identity Governance Framework”, a set of draft standards for sharing and controlling personally identifiable information across different systems and applications. He was particularly struck by the use of the term “governance” in this context, and how it reflects a changing discourse on privacy & identity management:
In the good old days, the social value to be safeguarded was called “privacy”. Then came computers, and the ugly word “data protection” took over. The semantic move was subtile, but worked to some extent: …

Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, has released a whitepaper augmenting Kim Cameron’s seven laws of identity with privacy protections: 7 Laws of Identity: The Case for Privacy-Embedded Laws of Identity in the Digital Age (PDF). I’m busy travelling, so I can’t print and read the entire document right now, but here are excerpts form the commission’s press release:
The next generation of intelligent and interactive web services (“Web 2.0”) will require more, not fewer, verifiable identity credentials, and much greater mutual trust to succeed.
Identity systems that are …

Registration is now open for the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” multidisciplinary graduate student symposium, September 29-30, 2006 at the NYU School of Law. Twenty graduate students from across North America and Europe will share their exciting research on the social, cultural, philosophical, legal and technical perspectives of systems of identity, identifiability and identification. In addition to graduate student panels, a keynote talk will be delivered by Professor Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa.
The symposium is free and open …

[I am one of the organizers the following graduate student symposium to be held this fall at NYU]
CALL FOR PAPERS
Identity and Identification in a Networked World:
A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium
When: September 29-30, 2006
Where: New York University
Submission deadline: July 5, 2006
Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits of information scattered throughout the data-intensive, networked world. Online and off, these core identifiers mediate our sense of self, social interactions, movements through space, and access to …