Digital Identification

There are many ways to identify yourself to another person. They can range from just showing your face to perhaps showing a pass to someone. When we show our face to a friend, they know many things about us and they will let us do a variety of things, according to our status with them. We might be able to borrow their lawnmower, but not their fancy car. When we show a pass to someone that we don't even know, they don't recognize us, but they recognize the pass. Because of that, they will let us do whatever specific things that holders of that pass are permitted to do.

That pattern carries through to many facets of our lives. We use our voice to identify ourselves to others over the phone, we use account numbers or signatures to identify ourselves to companies, we use our driver's license or our social security number to identify ourselves to government agencies, and so on. All of these forms of identification have been established to ensure that the people who should be permitted access to various services are able to do so - and that those who shouldn't be permitted to access them to be prevented from doing so.

When we work with computers, we frequently supply a user name combined with a Personal Identification Number (PIN) or a password as a means of identifying ourselves to the software that runs on the computers. As many people have learned, it is entirely possible for someone else to learn that information and then to masquerade as them, accessing services that are supposed to be reserved to them. Services such as withdrawing money from an ATM.

Just about everything that we use to identify ourselves has been stolen at one time or another. Our signatures are stolen by forgers. Our voices are stolen by impersonators. Our usernames and passwors are stolen by phishers. Our passes are stolen by yet more forgers.

Whenever someone steals identifying information, it constitutes a form of identify theft. By obtaining the information that identifies you to a computer, a thief has effectively stolen your identity as far as that computer is concerned. If that thief obtains enough information about you, they can do everything that you can do with computers.

These days, that a lot of stuff. Customer service employees don't know you at all, so if that thief has your username, password, date of birth, mother's maiden name, etc, they can answer all those security questions over the phone and the company employees won't hesitate to help the thief to all the services that you normally use. Computers are even less personal, and if the thief has your identifying information, they get to use the electronic services that you normally use. The computer believes that the thief is you.

Many companies and researchers are working on this problem. The solution has been to take a page from the olden days, when we identified ourselves by the way we look. Computers can be programmed to remember lots of things about our appearance and other things about our bodies. If we then approach a computer that has ever seen us before, it will recognize us in much the same way that our friends recognize us. The solution to the problem has been to recognize something about our bodies instead of recognizing something that we know, such as a password. This is the field of biometrics.

Biometrics is the study of measuring our bodies in a variety of ways. A promising biometric is the appearance of the eye. A computer uses a camera to look at your eye, and it remembers a variety of information about it. When the computer sees the same eye, it assumes that it is you. Because eyes are as individual as fingerprints, it's a good way to recognize people.

For a thief to steal your identity, they'd either have to steal your eye or figure out a way to show the computer a fake eye that matches your own. Neither is particularly practical for the typical thief. Combine the eye scan with other types of biometrics, such as fingerprint scanning or voice recognition, and you've made it even harder for someone to steal the information that identifies you. Someday we may include DNA scanning, requiring even more exotic techniques for thieves to steal your identity.

Now that you've got a way to reliably identify people to computers (and that means identification to strangers as well), what does Fort Data permit us to do? If Fort Data is really locked up tight and it can trust us to be us when we claim we're us, then Fort Data can be relied upon to provide all those delicate services that we were talking about. Services like tracking our health care information. Or our financial information. If you know that nobody is going to be able to get into your financial data unless you say so, you're going to be pretty happy to have that data stored in Fort Data. Without effective identification schemes, you're just assembling all your precious personal information in one place. That provides a greater incentive for thieves to be as sneaky as possible to steal your identifying information. If that identifying information is biometric data, they're going to have a very hard time indeed.

Digital Privacy

Most people are concerned about privacy in the digital age, where everything and anything that we do will be recorded by a computer somewhere. I heard a radio ad where a man was ordering a pizza, and the pizza company knew everything about the man's life, including some pretty personal stuff. That's not what's going to happen.

The way privacy will work in the future is that there will be a place where your data is stored. It will be a Fort Knox of data, with as much security as can possibly be put in place, both physical and electronic. Let's call it Fort Data.

Fort Data is set up such that you can let certain people record data about you. You'll let medical records be updated by your doctor. You'll let the phone company put phone call information into Fort Data. The pizza guys can even put a description of your favorite pie in there.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, huh? Now the pizza guys can go in and look at your medical records, right? Nope. Just as you control who can put what data INTO the records, you also control who can pull what data OUT of the records. Not only that, but you can have very close control over what they have access to.

For example, your medical records can be put into Fort Data with nauseating detail. When you want to fly on an airline, they may be legally required or just demand that you not have any communicable diseases. Instead of their screening software looking at all of your medical records, finding out that you have a bad heart or incontinence, all they can ask of Fort Knox is: Does this person have any communicable diseases? That's it. They can't find out what they are, how many there might be, or anything else. Just whether or not you have at least one.

So too, when you order your pizza, you decide what information the pizza company can find out about you. When you go to their web site, it may have a button to click to let them know your favorite pizza (taken from Fort Data), and there may be another button to let them know your home address when you say you want the pizza delivered. Of course, there will be a button to pay, but the pizza company doesn't need to know who the funds are coming from. All that needs to happen is that money has to appear in the pizza company's accounts. That happens because Fort Data does the transfer from your accounts to their accounts. If you pick up the pizza, all they get to see is you showing up to say that you get pizza #8816. It needn't be so sterile, but if you're worried about your privacy, you can avoid letting the pizza guys know anything about you, except what pizza you want.

Remember here that Fort Data did the transfer of funds so you could have your pizza. Fort Data remembers that. It remembers everything that you do. When you want to find out how much you've spent on pizza over the last year, you just ask. It knows that. When you want to see a chart of your cholesterol over time, it can show that to you because you've been visiting the doctor regularly and he's been updating your cholesterol level after each visit.

This all means that you have access to whatever data you want, that other people can put information into Fort Data when you say they can, and other people can pull information out when you say they can - and what they pull out can be really limited.

Another simple example is that you are a student at the local university and you want to go into the library. The library is only for use by university students. You wave your Fort Data identity card at the reader on the building to try to get in. The reader asks Fort Data if you are a university student. Fort Data says that you are, and the reader unlocks the door for you.

The reader only learned that you were a university student. It didn't learn your name, your address, your dorm, your grade point average, nothing. Just if you were a student, because that's all it needed to know.

Now comes the touchy part: law enforcement. Because people are not always good citizens, somebody has to be able to spot the bad ones. The information in Fort Data can be an invaluable resource to be able to do that. When an agent of law enforcement goes to poke around in Fort Data, realize that their actions are being recorded by Fort Data just like anyone else's would be. And law enforcement doesn't get free access. What they can do will be limited by law, just as they are limited now. Search warrants would be needed in order to poke around in an individual's information. Sometimes, searches would be limited to vague requests such as "Did they ever call Bob Jones?". So instead of looking at every phone call made, they would have to stick to questions that they can justify to a judge.

Or to us. Everything that a member of the law enforcement agencies looks at is going to be recorded by Fort Data. If I am being investigated by anyone, I will know it - unless the courts decide that the investigation warrants secrecy. The investigation will be recorded by Fort Data so that ultimately nothing is being done on the sly, but I won't be told that somebody is looking at my data.

So what we end up with is a vast repository of everything that we do, but we are the ultimate controller over our portion of that repository. Others can look at our data in a highly-regulated way, where the only exception is that law enforcement can look at the data subject to the checks and balances of the legal system which is obligated to watch over the members of the law enforcement world.

Oh, by the way, this means that we never fill out another form. If somebody needs information about us and we're okay with it, we permit them to go to Fort Data to get it. And Fort Data records the fact that they got it.

Perhaps the greatest danger will be that we will be asked if we want to let someone know some obscure score that is calculated from our Fort Data information. For example, today we have FICA scores. They tell banks and other lenders how we've been doing on paying our bills and whether we can be trusted with a loan. That's a pretty obscure bit of information, but who can we safely share that number with? We control the decision, but how can we know the implications of sharing it with a real estate agent or our employer?

As more and more stuff is collected in Fort data, we're undoubtedly going to start to see all sorts of calculations and tabulations that companies are going to want to run. A bank that wants to loan you money might want to make some calculation within Fort Data on your data to come up with a number that tells them whether or not to loan you money and at what interest rate. The calculations can all be done by Fort Data itself, such that the bank never sees your financial data. But once that number is calculated, won't other organizations and businesses be interested in it? If they ask to see your Bank of America Financial Score, is it a good idea to let them see it?

Next time, Digital Identification