I have a fairly long history of conversations with Kim Cameron (of Microsoft). Back when Kim first started formulating his "laws of identity," I pushed back very hard on the initial draft of law 1. From what Kim's told me, that push-back spurred him on to actually write the laws and get into blogging (and we're all quite glad he did). So, it is with great interest this morning that I read Kim's latest post - "Trends in what is known about us."
The post begins by stating that "information accumulates power by being put into proximity and aggregated," and then goes on to argue for an extension of this idea via a two-axis view. The two axis' are spectrums, where one access is "context specific data to all data joined," and the other axis is "data visible to some to data visible to all." Its really the very beginning of an incredibly interesting discussion, and I hope you'll go read all of what Kim has to say.
The idea that Kim's circling around (information aggregation and how that gets exposed) is really a step off from "Norlin's maxim" - a half-joking maxim I posited years ago that stated, "the internet inexorably pulls information from the private domain into the public domain." What Kim is working on is really an implicit assumption that Norlin's maxim is true (something I never would've imagined my joke would turn out to be), followed by a construct that would allow us to understand how it is we can view the control of that state.
Kim's prime directive in formulating the identity laws (at least, as I've always understood it) is that we (as identities) should be able to accomplish what we want to accomplish while exposing the least amount of personally identifiable information possible.
Kim's current line of thinking looks like its about to tackle the problem of how to handle information that naturally wants to aggregate -- ie, expose more about us via aggregation than we would have explicitly given it permission to do.
Given Kim's history, we should all be paying attention.
