In deeply conservative societies where social shame is weighed heavily, we could see a kind of “virtual honor killing”—dedicated efforts to ruin a person’s online identity either preemptively (by exposing perceived misdeeds or planting false information) or reactively (by linking his or her online identity to content detailing a crime, real or imagined). Ruined online reputations might not lead to physical violence by the perpetrator, but a young woman facing such accusations could find herself branded with a digital scarlet letter that, thanks to the unfortunate but hard-to-prevent reality of data permanence, she’d never be able to escape. And that public shame could lead one of her family members to kill her.
And what about the role of parents? Being a parent is hard enough, as anyone who has kids knows. While the online world has made it even tougher, it is not a hopeless endeavor. Parents will have the same responsibilities in the future, but they will need to be even more involved if they are going to make sure their children do not make mistakes online that could hurt their physical future. As children live significantly faster lives online than their physical maturity allows, most parents will realize that the most valuable way to help their child is to have the privacy-and-security talk even before the sex talk. The old-fashioned tactic of parents talking to their children will retain enormous value.
School systems will also adapt to play an important role. Parent-teacher associations will advocate for privacy and security classes to be taught alongside sex-education classes in their children’s schools. Such classes will teach students to optimize their privacy-and-security settings and train them to become well versed in the dos and don’ts of the virtual world. And teachers will frighten them with real-life stories of what happens if they don’t take control of their privacy and security at an early age.
Certainly some parents will try to game the system as well with more algorithmic solutions that may or may not have an effect. The process of naming a child offers one such example. As the functional value of online identity increases, parental supervision will play a critical role in the early stages of life, beginning with a child’s name. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of the popular economics book Freakonomics, famously dissected how ethnically popular names (specifically, names common in African-American communities) can be an indicator of children’s chances for success in life. Looking ahead, parents will also consider how online search rankings will affect their child’s future. The truly strategic will go beyond reserving social-networking profiles and buying domain names (e.g., www.JohnDavidSmith.com), and instead select names that affect how easy or hard it will be to find their children online. Some parents will deliberately choose unique names or unusually spelled traditional names so that their children have an edge in search results, making them easy to locate and promotable online without much direct competition. Others will go the opposite route, choosing basic and popular names that allow their children to live in an online world with some degree of shelter from Internet indexes—just one more “Jane Jones” among thousands of similar entries.
We’ll also see a proliferation of businesses that cater to privacy and reputation concerns. This industry exists already, with companies like Reputation.com using a range of proactive and reactive tactics to remove or dilute unwanted content from the Internet.1 During the 2008 economic crash, it was reported that several Wall Street bankers hired online reputation companies to minimize their appearance online, paying up to $10,000 per month for the service. In the future, this industry will diversify as the demand explodes, with identity managers becoming as common as stockbrokers and financial planners. Active management of one’s online presence—say, by receiving quarterly reports from your identity manager tracking the changing shape of your online identity—will become the new normal for the prominent and those who aspire to be prominent.
A new realm of insurance will emerge, too. Companies will offer to insure your online identity against theft and hacking, fraudulent accusations, misuse or appropriation. For example, parents may take out an insurance policy against reputational damage caused by what their children do online. Perhaps a teacher will take out an insurance policy that covers her against a student hacking into her Facebook account and changing details of her online profile to embarrass or defame her. We have identity-theft protection companies today; in the future, insurance companies will offer customers protection against very specific misuses. Any number of people could be attracted to such an insurance policy, from the genuinely in need to the generally paranoid.
Online identity will become such a powerful currency that we will even see the rise of a new black market where people can buy real or invented identities. Citizens and criminals alike will be attracted to such a network, since the false identity that could provide cover for a known drug smuggler could also shelter a political dissident. The identity will be manufactured or stolen, and it will come complete with backdated entries and IP (Internet protocol) activity logs, false friends and sales purchases, and other means of making it appear convincing. If a Mexican whistle-blower’s family needed to flee the violence of Ciudad Juárez and feared cartel retribution, a set of fake online identities would certainly help cover their tracks and provide them with a clean slate.
Naturally, this kind of escape route is a high-risk endeavor in the digital age: Embarking on a new life would require total disconnection from previous ties, because even the smallest gesture (like a search query for a relative) could give away a person’s position. Furthermore, anyone assuming a false identity would need to avoid all places with facial-recognition technology lest a scan of his or her face flag an earlier profile. And there would be no dark alleyways in this illicit market, either: All identities could be purchased over an encrypted connection between mutually anonymous parties, paid for with difficult-to-trace virtual currency. Brokers and buyers in this exchange would face risks similar to what black marketeers do today, including undercover agents and dishonest dealings (perhaps made all the more likely due to the anonymous nature of these virtual-world transactions).
Some people will cheer for the end of control that connectivity and data-rich environments engender. They are the people who believe that information wants to be free,2 and that greater transparency in all things will bring about a more just, safe and free world. For a time, WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange was the world’s most visible ambassador for this cause, but supporters of WikiLeaks and the values it champions come in all stripes, including right-wing libertarians, far-left liberals and apolitical technology enthusiasts. While they don’t always agree on tactics, to them, data permanence is a fail-safe for society. Despite some of the known negative consequences of this movement (threats to individual security, ruined reputations and diplomatic chaos), some free-information activists believe the absence of a delete button ultimately strengthens humanity’s progress toward greater equality, productivity and self-determination. We believe, however, that this is a dangerous model, especially given that there is always going to be someone with bad judgment who releases information that will get people killed. This is why governments have systems and valuable regulations in place that, while imperfect, should continue to govern who gets to make the decision about what is classified and what is not.