Once again the nagging questions of on-line identity, authenticity, and disambiguation have come across my radar screen. Josh Clark over at GlobalMoxie posted a couple of times this last week on both Spock and Wink. //engtech had a guest post on reputation management by Tim Nash earlier in the month, and claimD and openID have shown up in most of the top tech blogs at some point in the last quarter.
We’ve already seen some of the predictable consequences emerge. Among them: identity theft for both profit and revenge, firings for on-line activities that don’t fit corp. images, and the identities of anonymous parties (unintentionally) revealed through third parties.
Now I’m waiting to see what the unintended consequences of this on-line identity crisis and the attempts to fix it will be. Stay tuned.