Protecting your Personal Information

While your trail of online footprints needs protection, equally important is the more explicit information about yourself. Your bank accounts, birth certificate information, medical history, addresses and phone numbers, employment information and on and on is the subject of much privacy legislation and policymaking. The more scrupulous organizations tend to protect your personally identifiable information (PII), leaving the less scrupulous / more careless organizations, the ones less likely to talk about privacy policy, to regularly abuse your privacy.

My Own Information

The information space which we inhabit with our computers is becoming like other spaces - our homes, our kids' schools, our workplace. Unlike those buildings, however, the space in our computers is effectively outdoors. Providers of software and propagators of malware alike intrude upon our computers as though there are no walls or building codes in this, the space which should behave like any other indoor space.

While inside our computers, they help themselves to information about us, take it back and share it with their accomplices and end up with a disturbingly complete picture of all we say and do. Often they use that information to manipulate our perceptions.

The way to remedy this - to build spaces in which we own and control information about ourselves - is with the tools of authenticity, starting with reliable identities. While the RentalCredential bscures our online footprints, additional steps must be taken to thwart the eroders of our privacy. [..........add stuff here.......] After all, if you're going to protect your information, access to it must be guarded and managed under an identifier.

My Own Office

While your trail of online footprints needs protection, equally important is the more explicit information about yourself. Your bank accounts, birth certificate information, medical history, addresses and phone numbers, employment information and on and on is the subject of much privacy legislation and policymaking. The more scrupulous organizations tend to protect your personally identifiable information (PII), leaving the less scrupulous and careless organizations to regularly abuse your privacy.

There One of the biggest threats to privacy has nothing to do with the content of your messages and files but rather with your habits. While we need a reliable identity credential from which we can control the use of information about ourselves, just the act of using an online identity creates a trail of online footprints showing where you've been. That trail of online footprints is prized by marketers, governments, political parties and others who want to know, without your consent, where you've been, what you've been shopping for, what ideas you've been exposed to, what ideologies are represented by the sites you regularly visit. Whether the snoops are commercial, noncommercial or governmental, they all value your trail of footprints for the same reasons: to anticipate what you will do next, to manipulate your perceptions, and to attempt to influence your actions.

The RentalCredential breaks up your trail of footprints so that it conveys no meaningful information. As with a rental car, you use it for a limited period of time, then turn it in to be used by someone else. Back in the RentalCredential office there is a secured record of who had which credential at which time in case an audit is legally called for. As long as you're not doing things that would lead the authorities to seek a court order to "pierce you privacy veil" the you can leave the cookie clubs clueless about your whereabouts and your habits.