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Security/Contextual Identity Project: Difference between revisions
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Security/Contextual Identity Project (view source)
Revision as of 18:46, 18 September 2012
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= Goal = | |||
Enable users to gain sovereignty over their personal data, whether it is deliberately shared or passively tracked, inferred, or otherwise aggregated. | |||
= Background = | |||
<blockquote style="background:#eee;padding:3px;">"I am large, I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em> [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm]</blockquote> | <blockquote style="background:#eee;padding:3px;">"I am large, I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em> [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm]</blockquote> | ||
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Managing these different personas is easier in meatspace than online. In meatspace, there are more clues about how your information will be shared, most information will eventually be forgotten, and information leakage is easier to track and contain. By contrast, intuiting the total amount of personal information shared online that can be inferred via a vast array of technologies (cookies, web bugs, search engines, user-supplied application data, log data) is difficult. Yet many users would like the convenience of chatting, posting, gaming, and otherwise participating in all their multiple identities or personas without the cognitive burden of preventing information leakage between them. | Managing these different personas is easier in meatspace than online. In meatspace, there are more clues about how your information will be shared, most information will eventually be forgotten, and information leakage is easier to track and contain. By contrast, intuiting the total amount of personal information shared online that can be inferred via a vast array of technologies (cookies, web bugs, search engines, user-supplied application data, log data) is difficult. Yet many users would like the convenience of chatting, posting, gaming, and otherwise participating in all their multiple identities or personas without the cognitive burden of preventing information leakage between them. | ||
Firefox already has several features that enable users to manage contextual identities. There is a profile manager that allows users to have multiple sets of cookies, bookmarks, addons, and anything else in local storage [http://mzl.la/LL5Dxl]. Unfortunately it's too much work for people [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214675#c53]. There's also Private Browsing Mode [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1929828], which | Firefox already has several features that enable users to manage contextual identities. There is a profile manager that allows users to have multiple sets of cookies, bookmarks, addons, and anything else in local storage [http://mzl.la/LL5Dxl]. Unfortunately it's too much work for people [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214675#c53]. There's also Private Browsing Mode [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1929828], which is a great first step but doesn't address the whole problem space. | ||
We need to understand what people really want before we can create software to serve them. It's not about how people can operate our software, but rather how the software can operate as people expect. A large problem with complex systems like the Web is that peoples' expectations of how their identity and data is treated do not match up to reality. | We need to understand what people really want before we can create software to serve them. It's not about how people can operate our software, but rather how the software can operate as people expect. A large problem with complex systems like the Web is that peoples' expectations of how their identity and data is treated do not match up to reality. | ||
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Deliverables: | Deliverables: | ||
; Relationship to Manifesto : This project is core to the values held by Mozilla. | ; Relationship to Manifesto : This project is core to the values held by Mozilla. The underlying goal of this project is for users to gain sovereignty over their personal information, first by enabling them to inspect their data holistically, then allowing them to curate it to fit the desired contextual identities. | ||
; Hypothesis and Estimated Outcome : Problem statement, | ; Hypothesis and Estimated Outcome : Problem statement: We suspect there are already common techniques for managing contextual identities, but have not catalogued or quantified them. Criteria for success: Design and run user studies for quantifying these common techniques. | ||
; Research plan : What kind of investigation is necessary and what resources are needed. | ; Research plan : What kind of investigation is necessary and what resources are needed. | ||