The VRM challenge is not just that information is held in big databases. It is that every bit of process – human, clerical, IT system, legal framework, behavioural expectations – is currently designed, or rather has grown up over the years without very much overall design, on the assumption that data is to be found in databases.
Following remarkably quickly from the general point, here is a very particular example: A person claiming to be the hacker who obtained access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo e-mail on Tuesday has posted a supposed first-person account of the hack, revealing the relatively simple steps he says he took to crack the private [...]
There is a famous New Yorker cartoon – two dogs sitting in front of a computer with the caption, "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog". I would save you the trouble of clicking on the link to see it, except that the New Yorker would like me to pay them $360 a year [...]
Kable reports that: The Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa) has become less effective in enforcing road traffic legislation, as a result of a government wide rule banning devices holding unencrypted personal data from leaving the office. … Transport minister Jim Fitzpatrick said in a written parliamentary answer to Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins on 2 [...]
The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space is beyond question. Their significance – for those who are part of them and for society more generally – is less easily understood. Whether explicitly intended or not (and ‘not’ seems much the more likely), they entail an approach to managing identity and [...]
When you aggregate your online identities you actually loose control of your data – you loose the social mechanisms we create to keep our ‘real life’ social networks apart. In many ‘vanilla’ examples that ‘loss of control’ is actually a good thing – it might be unlocking a corporate contact network so that everyone in [...]
The Register doesn’t ususally do thoughtful and considered, but there’s an article today which expresses identify management thinking in unusually comprehensible language. It all sounds profoundly sensible to me – and if no longer the absolute opposite of ID card thinking, still a good way away from where the discussions are within government. There are [...]
… or why data mining is a good way to find stolen credit cards and not at all a good way to find terrorists: No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification [...]
According to The Sunday Times, Tony Blair’s flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project. They helpfully reproduce the email exchange as well. No doubt their authors will be aspiring to a considerably [...]
The LSE identity card team has come up with another report: On top of its earlier recommendations, we now recommend that the project be moved to a department with greater experience in complex IT systems because of failures by the Home Office to incorporate feedback into its designs. We recommend the Treasury as the primary [...]