Insistence on a single, real-name identity will kill Facebook - gives telcos a chance for differentiation

Note: This post was written before Google+ , Google's stance on pseudonyms, and the rise of #nymwars . Most of this article applies just as much to Google as Facebook.
 
There's been a fair amount of debate about online identity in recent days, partly spurred by Techcrunch's shift to using Facebook IDs for blog comments in an effort to reduce trolling and spamming. Various web luminaries have weighed in on one side of the debate or the other.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has been quoted in David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect: "You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly ... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

I think that's narrow-minded nonsense, and I also believe that this gives the telcos a chance to fight back against the all-conquering Facebook - if, and only if, they have the courage to stand up for some beliefs, and possibly even push back against political pressure in some cases. They will also need to consider de-coupling identity from network-access services.

Operators could easily enable people to have multiple IDs, disposable IDs, anonymity, tell lies, have pseudonyms or nicknames, allow your past history to "fade" and various other options.

In other words, they could offer "privacy as a service".

There are numerous reasons why people might wish to use a "fake" identity - segmenting work and personal lives, segmenting one social circle from another and so on. There are many real-world situations in which you want to participate online, but with a different name or identity: perhaps because you have a stage or performance name, perhaps you have a (legal) "guilty secret" of some sort, or maybe because you want to whistleblow against people in authority or those that you perceive as dangerous. It can even be because your name is just too common (JohnSmith16785141), or too unusual or difficult to spell (Bubley). It is also common for people to want to participate as part of a company, not an individual.

I know plenty of people who use pseudonyms on Facebook and other social media sites, and for *personal* things I'd say that's good for all sorts of reasons. In a business context, I agree with websites such as LinkedIn and Quora that enforce real names, because there is a strong "reputation" angle to their businesses. But on the other hand, if I had to deal with 300 LinkedIn requests a day from random people I haven't met, I'd probably change my mind.

There is another, important side to anonymity and multiple identities - obfuscating parts of your persona and contact details from advertisers and spammers. Being able to give a secondary (and ideally disposable) email address or mobile phone number to untrusted parties is important. I still use my fixed number for most online forms in the UK, because there's a legally-enforced telemarketing opt-out, while giving a mobile number risks spam SMS. The same is true of online identities - I want to be able to corral spammers and unwanted advertisers in a corner of my Internet world that I can safely nuke if I have to.

So, there is an opportunity for operators to offer - either individually or collectively - a more friendly set of identity options. This probably relates more to mobile operators than fixed operators, but not necessarily. A critical element here is that ID *cannot* be always tied to a SIM card or phone number, for most of these use cases. Users will not wish to be tied to a single access provider, not least because many times they will not be using a single, operator-issued device or that provider's access network. They will also not want to pay for an access account in perpetuity, just to make blog comments or something equally trivial. And, painful though it is to telcos, they *will* churn, and using identity as a lock-in will reduce trust and take-up of the services.

In other words, a telco-provided custom ID will need to be provided OTT-style - something like Orange's ON service , a cross-network app which enshrines principles from studies of psychology and anthropology - such as the right to lie. You need to be able to "take your privacy/idnetity profile with you" when you move to another operator. Unless we want to wait 10 years to force through "identity portability" laws, operators will fail to exploit this opportunity if they just try and see it as a churn-reduction tool.

This also means that interoperability between privacy providers is unncessary and even undesirable. Operators can - and should - go it alone to start with, which is why fixed operators have a chance as well as mobile. Living in the UK, would I use AT&T or Telenor as a privacy provider? Maybe, depends on whether I like a specific service and trust them, but I'd be more keen than going with one of the UK operators who'd try to link the capability into other services. Although that said, I'd probably use certain aspects of this broader idea from my current telecom providers - perhaps a second "fake" number I could use for advertisers and potential spammers.

(It goes without saying that most or all of this will need to be built outside rigid architectures such as IMS or RCS, which also have centralised repositories for subscriber information, unique personal identifiers attached to credentials such as SIMs, and an assumption of access/service coupling).

Now there is an open question here about full anonymity. A lot will come down to local attitudes and laws. Some countries already force users of previously-anonymous services such as Internet cafes or prepaid mobile phones to register with the authorities - for example Italy, Spain and India. Others like the UK and Portugal are still OK with off-the-shelf purchases of SIM cards, anonymous web access and so forth - luckily our new government binned the hideous UK ID card project when it came to power last year. As events in the Middle East have shown, anonymous and easy access to communications helps protesters against despotism - possibly a price worth paying for a minuscule rise in terrorism risk. Personally I have the luxury of democracy, and I tend to vote for libertarianism rather than nannying state intervention, but your opinion may vary.

(And yes, I understand that real, true anonymity is almost impossible - both online and in the real world. We are traceable via credit cards, mobile phone records, facial-recognition CCTV, and probably online semantics and other behaviours. But at the moment, it's difficult to join the dots unless you are Google or a government security agency).

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Facebook and believe that in many ways it is going to eat the telcos' collective lunch. Friend lists are already usurping the notion of a phone "address book", and web-based approaches make social networks much more flexible than a telecoms infrastructure can be. It's tempting to believe that Facebook is now too big to fail - but don't underestimate the fickleness of social groups. I've had a few friends who have had pseudonym-based profiles deleted, and they are definitely no longer loyal users.


I strongly suspect this is not an area in which the telcos will move together, en masse. It is an opportunity for some of the more forward-thinking and perhaps renegade operators (or specific product teams) to move aggressively and across network boundaries. If ID gets mired in years of interop talks and nonsense about support of roaming, it will go the same way as other "coalitions of the losers". This needs to be done NOW and done aggressively by those brave enough to step up - perhaps in partnership with a web provider or two.