* Who’s watching your identity?
Pamela Dingle, from Calgary’s Nulli Secundis, is known as one of the world’s foremost advocates of Microsoft CardSpace as well as being a driving force behind integration of the major user-centric identity systems (CardSpace, OpenID, the Bandit Project, etc.) through her “PamelaWare” alter ego. In her spare time, she blogs on identity issues and other aspects of life on a blog dubbed “Adventures of an Eternal Optimist.” Her optimism was challenged recently.
If you keep, or just read, blogs you’ll know that folks can’t keep up with the proliferation of Web sites they would need to visit to read them all. Syndication via the RSS or ATOM protocols solves that problem by allowing a desktop or Web-based tool to collect new postings and present them to you – following a “publish and subscribe” model. (If you aren’t familiar with RSS, go here for an explanation and some links to tools.)
Recently, the organization that provides the RSS subscription feed for Pamela’s blog had a hiccup and started sending out someone else’s blog postings under Pamela’s name. Imagine getting the “DAVE KEARNS ON IDENTITY MANAGEMENT” newsletter in your inbox, but having the content come from Jeff Caruso’s “LANs & Routers” newsletter. Jeff’s a nice guy, but his content isn’t very closely related to identity management!
Still, the “LANs & Routers” news would be fairly innocuous, I imagine. What happened to Dingle was a bit more embarrassing – under the heading “Help! My two year old is a screaming monster!” was a stream of consciousness rant about psychotherapeutic drug use which gave the impression that Pamela was BWI (not the Baltimore airport, but Blogging While Intoxicated)!
Reputation is a big part of anyone’s identity, and reputation – at least digital reputation – is, in large part, built upon what someone writes online. Had not she quickly discovered the problem, it’s quite possible that reputational damage could have been done. But worse, as she noted: “What if this wasn’t my personal blog affected. What if this was, instead, my corporate ERP system affected? Or my corporate e-mail system? What happens when a hosting company mixes up the account identifiers of two different companies’ financial accounts? What could the possible cost be, in both reputation and income, of your company’s confidential data being temporarily disclosed to another company’s users? Or of your company’s identity being temporarily associated with somebody else’s confidential data?”
It isn’t just identity theft, or identity fraud, that you need to worry about, but lost, strayed, or misplaced identity too. Who’s watching your reputation?
Upcoming Event: M-Tech CTO Idan Shoham will deliver a 45-minute Webinar on ‘Quick Wins in Identity Management’ sponsored by the Oxford Computer Group on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 10 a.m. MDT (noon EDT, 9 a.m. PDT). Learn how to get value early and often from your identity management initiative; how to manage risks in projects by dealing with long timelines, user impacts and multiple stakeholders; and how your organization can capitalize on quick wins to propel your project to success in addition to discovering what a typical timeline should look like. Sign up today!
