To protect your privacy, hand over your data - tech - 22 October 2009 - New Scientist

Description

Verifying your identity generally comes down to entering one "key" that only you can provide – be it a password, credit card number or RFID tag.

That's not good enough, according to a new proposal, which suggests that our digital identities will be more secure if they rest on reams of data on our everyday life culled from cellphones, online transactions and the like.

The idea comes from Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Human Dynamics Laboratory. The lab is a pioneer of " reality mining " – studying how people behave by using the crumbs of digital data our every action now produces.

"You are what you do and who you do it with," says Pentland. Researchers and corporations have realised the potential of such data mining, he points out. "It is already happening and it is time for people to get a stake."

Personal control

If people gain control of their own personal data mines, rather than allowing them to be built and held by corporations, they could use them not only to prove who they are but also to inform smart recommendation systems, Pentland says.

He recognises that allowing even limited access to detailed logs of your actions may seem scary. But he argues it is safer than relying on key-like codes and numbers, which are vulnerable to theft or forgery.

"It is not feasible for a single organisation to own all this rich identity information," Pentland says. What he envisages instead is the creation of a central body, supported by a combination of cellphone networks, banks and government bodies.

That bank could provide "slices" of data to third parties that want to check a person's identity. That information could be much like that required to ...

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