Privacy is one of the biggest issues in making the web as interconnected as we hope someday that it will be--and in particular, privacy that is under the user’s control. In face-to-face interactions even people who know our names don’t know all of us. I present a different ‘face’ to my boss than to my mother. The people I go tracking with on Sunday mornings know different things about me than the writer’s group I meet with on Sunday nights. The internet, which has the potential to interconnect everything, to remember everything and to make it searchable can reveal parts of me that I would prefer not be revealed. Things that are not private, but are not public either. Things that for most people could be filed under--none of your business. The different facets of our persona is ours to reveal or conceal as we wish; it shouldn’t be constructed by web spiders with equal emphasis on one-time rants and lifetime dedications.

And yet, reputation systems are becoming increasingly important as ways to help people cut through information clutter, to provide ranking mechanisms for goods and services and for other uses that we haven’t realized yet. At Many to Many, Clay Shirky points to a post by Ben Hyde on an anonymous reputation system that relies on group recommendations:

Let's say I have an excellent reputation in some community. I request that community write me a letter of introduction to the anonymous community. This letter says nothing more than the bearer of this letter is a good guy. I take the note to the anonymous community and they provide me with an reputation/identity that I can use to on anonymous actions. Recipients of those actions can then check that anonymous reputation. If I act badly in that persona then they place bad marks on the anonymous reputation; but it these do not go back to my original reputation - there is no back pointer. The only back pointer available is the link to the original community. I have damaged the reputation of my home community, and only that.

It's an interesting cryptographic design problem. Could we design a system where sufficiently bad actions on the part of the anonymous actor can be feed back to his original persona but that does not require that we trust the anonymous reputation communities to guard his privacy otherwise.

For discussion of persistent identity and privacy, see this post from last year on the Augmented Social Network.