Identity without a name

David Birch is a British consultant and author. He is a director of Consultant Hyperion, a specialist electronic transactions consulting firm that advises governments and large companies on electronic identity and electronic money. He speaks on the topic of identity because this is something that we can all relate to. He uses his storytelling to really bring into the subject. What he does is really expand on the topic by using facts about the topic but also using humor to go along with it. He tries to keep people engaged in the topic but using information that everyone can relate to.  We treat our identity at times as the most important part of our lives. We become enraged when people have falsely misuse or disrespect ourselves. But he also brought up the topic of we also really do not care about our identity at times as well. So the question is that identity really secure?

He spoke on several different topics. He started on the chip and pin card. The premise of having your identity on your card has been around since the conception of using your card to pay for items and obtain your money from the bank. The chip in the card is highly sophisticated and holds a lot of information about the cardholder. David made a great point in the fact that the information is embedded in the card itself. So why do we have to then imprint our name on the card itself. This feature is not useful for us at all. We already know who we are. We do need to have our name on the card. The only person that the imprint benefits at this point is the criminal who is trying to steal my identity. With the name of the card, you can easily find out the person address. Now the person just need to make a copy of the card. Now instead of using the highly sophisticated chip in the card which is highly secured, you have dwindled it to an easier access for any person to simply copy the front of the card and steal your identity. We think that we are so protective of our identity but in actuality we are not. We try our best to keep things secret but we put things out there that is not necessary. 

Chat rooms are a big way of communicating and meeting new people. Even with chat rooms, we are using the premise of keeping our identities to ourselves. We put out false personas about ourselves on these chat rooms but we want other people to be honest about their identities. We use our identities to our advantage and feel that we can easily just erase something about our identity when needed especially online. Online, we can create a persona about ourselves and simply delete that persona when we feel that it is not useful to our benefit. So what is the real purpose of identity if we can get rid of it so easily?

 Lastly, he went on the topic of being anonymous. Now we put out the false identities about ourselves and try to keep our identities anonymous. But how can we continue to remain anonymous when things become crucial in certain situations. He went on to comment the fact when we are trying to remain anonymous when reporting something of importance we must be credible. And in order to be credible we must put out some information about ourselves to identify ourselves as being credible about the event. So what is the point of being anonymous when in the end we have to put out some information about ourselves?

This topic really opened up my eyes to identity. It really speaks about the fact that identity is not secured and how we really do not protect it. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_birch_identity_without_a_name.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_G._W._Birch