Sorry I’m late to the keyboard–long day. I want to talk about how culture is changing people’s expectations of privacy, anonymity and identity. Hope I’m making sense at this hour.

For 1 billion people on this planet, and 37 million in the U.K., the effects of frequent Internet use are changing our behaviour–and, I think our expectations.

We now are used to passing financial and personal details online to a vendor we don’t know. We are used to multiple passwords. Those of us who comment on weblogs are getting used to replicating letters and numbers written in wavy script just to get our comments published. Those of us on social networking sites regularly post details of our lives that we would not tell our mothers, let alone our banks.

We behave differently to people who do not connect. And I think, regarding surrendering information, we have collectively shown that we’ll do it–if the following conditions are satisfied:

1. We trust the recipient (Not like them, or know their employees. We essentially trust the brand.)
2. The Brand explains to us why they want the information and how they will use it.
3. They give us an alternative.
4. There is a carrot, and a chance to unsubscribe, opt out, etc.

For those of us in the UK, these conditions are added to the surrender of privacy brought on by the CCTV culture. We’re always on, we know it, internalise it and ignore it. Because CCTV does not do what it says on the tin (stop crime), we think it does nothing. We’re safe in our numbers. The ubiquity of mobile phone and digital cameras adds to this.

The police do not need my DNA to get me–my profile is up on MySpace. People have announced impending crimes and suicides on social networking sites.

The implications of all this are that society will (once again) split into those who have acculturated themselves to the loss of privacy and those who have not. Support for ID management issues may follow that split.

The other factor is Internet schizophrenia. I may not know you’re a dog–or a Lara Croft lookalike in Second Life, a pre-teen on MySpace and a regular commenter under a false name at any number of blogs, news sites and forums. Soon, I may not care–I might have my pseudo identity or identities of my own, each with a private email and Skype number. We all may have different reasons for setting up different identities (I have talked with one young girl who had seven MySpace blogs, one for each boyfriend…), but will anybody be surprised if people start adding enough weight to these identities to make them credible entities in the eyes of society and the law?

If I have a name, a weblog, an email address and a Skype point, how much more do I need to get instruments more commonly recognised as proof of identity? And how much longer before I begin to spoof the identity masters?