I saw a presentation by Dick Hardt where he talked about the current state of affairs of online identity management. He gave an analogy of “vitamins, painkillers, and viagra” — and here I grossly paraphrase — vitamins are good for you, but you don’t really wanna take them; painkillers you take because you HAVE to take them cause you’re feeling the pain; viagra is something you take because you get really excited by it and it enables you to do new things. He postulates that websites are somewhere between vitamins and painkillers in terms of adopting new fangled technologies such as OpenId and Windows CardSpace.

Old school identity management was (is?) about identity silos. Data goes in, not much comes out. New hot identity management is about a unified identity, giving users the control to centrally manage who they are, and who they want to share their information with. Sounds great from a user perspective, but how do Google and Yahoo and Ebay and whoever else get to benefit from this? It’s unclear; which is why we’ve got lots of people jumping on the OpenId provider bandwagon but we don’t see a lot of the large websites accepting OpenId anytime soon.

While unified identity sounds great from a maintenance perspective (woohoo, I never have to type in my favorite CDs again!), I’ve definitely taken advantage of my splintered identity on the internet. For example, my professional linkedIn profile is drastically different from my (now defunct) college facebook profile, and I share the former with colleagues and the latter with casual friends and never the two shall meet. In an Identity 2.0 world, there is an implicit link between the two profiles because the data is funneled from some central source which is tied to some unique identifier (OpenId, email address, SSN… ) which is tied to a single person: me. However I would still want the ability to present myself in different ways for different contexts. I see the need for more privacy levels as well as ways to classify HOW each piece of my data is used if I am really going to micromanage my online identity in a consolidated fashion.