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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How you doing today on this episode of the show, we're gonna talk about pornography and identity. Now, hopefully this doesn't get caught by the various social media networks, filtering algorithms, but there's a very legitimate discussion to be had here. Now, two articles crossed my um stream over the last few days, seemingly unrelated.
Um but both tied to the idea of digital identity. The first is relevant here in Canada. Um Our major banks got together over the last few years and created a new identity service that's just about to launch called verify.me. And the idea here is that you'll have one centralized identity service online that will enable you to access various financial products.
And then in the future, who knows? It's an interesting concept and it does really tackle the core challenge for financial services is around fraud and you know, verifying user identity and that's absolutely critical in the financial realm, but it does raise the question. Why do you need an independent service?
Isn't it good enough that I have an account with bank A? And if I do business with Bank B, I can do that, we have other ways of verifying financial identity, um, through government documents through, uh, credit checks, um, verifying information on those credit checks, things like that.
I'm not sure what need this solves other than what they're saying is, you know, sort of future products, which is always sort of ominous. Now, keep that in the back of your head for a minute in the New York Times this week, there was an interesting article about the end result of a new law or recent legislation um that happened in the UK.
Now it's not Brexit, thankfully, we're talking about non Brexit political UK issues. So the Digital Economy Act of 2017 in the UK essentially put in a number of regulations around how the internet was used and served up in the country. And one of the biggest key ones is sort of is starting to come into effect now and that's around preventing kids from stumbling across pornography online.
At least that was the said and stated intent behind the law. And essentially what it means is that in addition to the country level filter that the UK already does over certain content in the uh on the internet um served up by their I SPS, they're going to be adding in age verification for pornographic content.
Now, don't get me wrong. This isn't necessarily a bad idea in theory, as soon as you implement it though, there's a lot of problems. Now, the New York Times article goes on to to call out the specific challenges around uh the way that this law is coming to effect and how mind GEP uh Mind Geek, which is a international pornographic conglomerate.
It's essentially getting handed a monopoly and a leg up on their competitors by the UK government, which is somewhat ironic, but that's not what I wanted to talk to you about. What I want to talk to you about was the concept here. So the concept is that they are going to put age gates in for people trying to access pornography.
And in order to pass those age gates, they're not the simple ones that you see on like Sony's PS four um store or on some other sites where they're basically like just tell us your birthday. And as long as you put in something that puts you over 18, you get in, um these are actually verifying with government documentation.
So um a lot of the, the systems that have been proposed that are being kicked around are sort of like take a selfie, upload it with a copy of your driver's license or government ID. Um In order to gain access to these sites. Now, there's obviously some very significant uh concerns around uh information, uh personal information.
This is obviously critical, personally identifiable information. How are these companies going to handle it? Um But also there's obvious conflicts of interest challenges if the pornography companies are in charge of verifying the, the um age now that raises a whole host of issues that we are not going to tackle here in this episode, what we are going to tackle is looking at verified.me and looking at the digital economy acts push for age.
Uh gaining walls around pornographic content is the very concept of identity. And that's critical to cybersecurity. It's critical to your online privacy. And I remember a conversation I had back uh with a friend and colleague um in the Canadian public service years ago around a massive identity project, they were spitting up and they were asking me what my opinion on identity was.
And I said it's really interesting because most people think when they go into an identity project, you have one identity, you're Mark, you're looking at Mark. Mark is talking to you. Um Here you go. But there are different aspects of my identity that are relevant in different areas of my digital and personal life.
We saw this a bit um uh a couple of episodes ago on mornings with Mark here. Uh we're on Facebook and Information management. The same thing applies when it comes to identity. Now, when I am interacting with my financial institution, there is a deeper level of information that I'm comfortable sharing.
I'm obviously uh legally required to give them certain government identifying information. They have my financial information. I want them to be able to access uh investment information that may sit at another institute. There's a level there. If I'm dealing with my doctor, there's obviously a much deeper health information.
Uh you know, personal information sharing around health information that I want my doctor to have. But I don't want my doctor and my finance to cross over. I don't need my doctor to know about my mortgage or my investments. I don't need my uh bank to know about any health conditions or the state of my health in general.
So identity on a very simple level means multiple different facets all associated. Back to me, the question is who has control here? And this is why I wanted to bring this up is that both of these scenarios essentially give a centralized concept of identity for one vertical.
And I don't know if that's a healthy thing. This is one of these episodes where we're just gonna be raising a ton of questions, not a lot of answers, but a ton of questions. So within your organization, if you're setting up your employees and your teams, you want one identity and then you give them different permissions based on that identity, different information access.
But should that work? Identity, track them later on or should be associated to other identities? I don't know. It really is an interesting scenario. Another one where this comes up a lot, especially in my CBC radio column is around kids. So you think about uh Google uh G Suite for education being used or um uh you know, office 365 for education, specifically around Google for Education.
The G Suite for Education is that these kids have an educational G suite account and they have the ability to roll that over into a real account when they graduate in age, out of the uh out of the school system. But even while they're in the school system, everything is being accumulated under the protection of the educational privacy, um in terms of service, privacy in terms of service.
But there are certain services in Google that don't get associated uh under that policy or don't fall under that policy. So there's still information being tracked to this sort of shadow account, they know it's a concept but it doesn't have the full details. So there's, there's all these different aspects of identity and I think it's really boils down to, you know, privacy, it's a core component of privacy.
Um And it's up to us to be able to control it. The challenge is, is that means basically decentralization. Now there's some really interesting decentralization efforts underway some consortiums that are trying to push it out some really interesting technological uses of this. Um But at the end of the day, I think anybody dealing with your own online identities, um dealing with cybersecurity, dealing with privacy.
You need to understand that there is a difference in identities, you are yourself, but you need all these little fractional facades of identities that associate back to you so that you can use them in certain contexts at certain times. And you see users and you see people online doing this themselves by setting up accounts that they use only for a certain amount of time.
So they have email accounts that they use for, uh, shopping, they have email accounts, they use for correspondence, the email accounts they use for sports leagues and stuff like that. Um, that's people trying to work around this fundamental problem is that we have no decentralized way and I say decentralized because you don't want to push the authority and the value of the identity into one place.
Um But you need to be able to better manage these sort of fractional identities as you go online and efforts like the Digital Economy Act in the UK uh like the verified about me here in Canada are interesting pushes, I understand the problem they're trying to solve, but I think they're actually going to create more issues um and more serious issues than they actually address.
What do you think? Let me know, hit me up online at Mark NC A in the comments down below as always uh by email me at Mark N dot C A. Identity is a fascinating topic. Um This should be a really good discussion. I look forward to having it uh with you and seeing you on the next episode of the show.
