COVER STORY
The Counterfeit You
Hunter Whitney
Hunter Whitney and Associates, Inc.| hunter@hunterwhitney.com
Imagine that some stranger
in a shady corner of the Web
comes across your name and a
few details of your life and puts
together an online presence
uncomfortably reminiscent of
you. Hard to know what to think
at first. It could be anything
from coincidence to a con or
something else altogether. But
this feels more ominous than the
theft of a credit card number.
We can cancel the plastic, but
we can’t cancel our identities.
I was involved in such a case
recently, and while I cannot discuss the specifics, it introduced
me to ideas involving the broader
significance of online identity,
which is perhaps not discussed
widely enough in our professional community.
Your identity consists not of
the impersonal strings of numbers assigned to your name by
business and government, but
of the combination of attributes
that fundamentally make you,
you. It is a kind of quicksilver
that can be hard to grasp but
ultimately is crucial to how you
relate to others and how they
relate to you. It is the sum of our
personal histories, personalities,
relationships, beliefs, biology, the
patterns of our lives and activities, our habits, and more. It is
our interface to the world and the
internal code that drives us.
Both actively and passively, we
create an ever more detailed digital self-portrait. We may be the
original content providers, but we
are unable to know what mate-
rial will be viewed and how it will
be used now and in the future.
From blogging to swiping a card
at the supermarket, the behavioral patterns of our daily lives
are captured in data streams;
they create new representations
of ourselves. The resulting depictions are dependent on how the
data is crunched by algorithms
and also by the various kinds of
people who interact with it. Sure,
that sounds a little abstract and
distant. It’s difficult to imagine
anyone doing anything problematic with your stuff. But that’s
part of the problem; it can be
entirely and reasonably unimaginable. Until it isn’t. Our personal
identities may be appropriated for
simple, direct theft or for more
elaborate and nuanced forms of
“social engineering” misdeeds
such as pretexing. While the idea
of using someone else’s name
or information for all kinds of
underhanded purposes is certainly as old as human society,
the impostors have powerful and
rapidly evolving new sets of tools.
For many of us, our online
presence is becoming an important part of our external identities and has a growing sway over
our professional and personal
lives. Digital media can capture
and present sides and angles of
ourselves that we may not have
known were there. Our virtual
presence can have lasting influences on real-life interactions.
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and Match.com, not
to mention the Google search
results of our names, can sometimes make up the sole representation of our identities to someone interested in learning about
us. We are numerical strings,
user names, and template profiles. Accurate or not, such data
can be someone’s primary means
of forming an impression of who
we are. We are entering into a
kind of open source experiment
in identity. Who knows how
much the things we choose to
present about ourselves online
may influence our self-perception. Do we start to believe our
own hype? There may be identity
feedback dynamics that we have
yet to recognize and understand.
It would be hard for many
of us to conceive not having
the search results at our disposal. The results provide us
with instant résumés and context about others. In the past, if
we really wanted to learn about
someone, we had to rely on talking to people. Now we can get
insights and information about
others almost instantly without
the input of anyone else. For a
Web 2.0 spin on Descartes, consider that “SEO ergo sum” may be
more appropriate these days than
Cogito ergo sum. The catch is that
much of this process is mediated
by algorithms rather than people.
This means that a system that
can often be a powerful proxy of
our identities can also be easily
manipulated. We can SEO (search
engine optimization) ourselves,
but the question is, what do we
stand for? What are our true
