Build a long-term identity management

Here is a new article I read recently, Identity management throughout one’s whole life. It mentions a concept called “partial identities”- an individual typically appears under different partial identities for work, others for leisure activities, or dealing with companies. And this figure below is one example from the article, Partial identity of John.

The author of this article thinks identity management system which contains mechanisms for user-controlled privacy, covering all areas of life, covering all stages of life and covering the full lifespan should be designed. Long-term identity management is what people may not consider much before. Like when I first register Renren, the Chinese Facebook, I didn’t realize that it will store my personal data for six years and longer. Maybe it’s too extreme to think that one website or app will relate to our whole long life, however, some of them may actually act as a storage space and show platform of our personal life for a long time. Ourselves and our relationships with others and the whole society changes quite often in the contemporary era. Like when we were freshmen, everything is interesting and we liked to share many pictures and states with peers, but as we are moving closer to the professional world, much more things should be considered on the social medias.

Renren, the Chinese Facebook, launches a new widget in the second half year of 2012. It is a photo widget which automatically shows pictures which were uploaded in the same day of several years ago. And it’s immovable, no matter which part you are scanning one the news page, it’s always there, turning over photos. This widget is nice and warm when you find moving photos your friend uploaded three years ago, however, its also very awkward and scary to see unseemly funny pics of yourself five years ago or find your boyfriend’s joint photo with his ex four years ago. Sometimes we just throw our personal information into social medias and don’t know how to mange it as it becomes too huge to organize. And sometimes the problem of identity management is not how to build more but to delete some. When I set a small survey on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) to ask for friends opinion of the widget I mentioned above, several said they don’t like that widget and one of my friend even provides me a plug-in to delete that album.