What is up with Online Identity?

- single sign-on options becoming very common (facebook, twitter, google, linkedin), and are even used by ideological opponents because of the benefits of social graphs
- "being able to walk down a city street anonymously is on the verge of disappearing" --even offline identity will soon be tracked
- Google, Facebook, other social networks (not Twitter) strongly enforce use of "real names" in the US, but care less for users outside of US (no universal concept of a real name, also less monetary motives for enforcing outside of US)
- OpenID -- failed attempt at single sign-on with more privacy options/permissions than facebook connect etc (doesn't allow for social graphs)
- do people even want to control these permissions? doesn't seem like this.... (tradeoffs for privacy v. convenience-- convenience wins every time)
- nonprofits fighting this (pretty much all on defensive rather than offensive) EFF (legal side) & Mozilla (software side), EPIC
- Ghostery = great firefox add-on that blocks all third party resources when loading pages
- nonprofits can use same tactics ad companies use against their corporate opponents (playing dirty but it works!)
- no real way to erase your online identity (even if you delete your facebook account, your info is just marked as deleted, not actually deleted)
- history of humanity up to 2003 stored same amount of data that we store every 48 hours
- content industries spend way more on lobbying than high tech industries, thus the current Protect ID act and SOPA (potential to "kill" the internet) -- interestingly Protect ID supported by more democrats than republicans, and most big tech corporations (google, ebay, twitter, facebook, etc) have signed letter against this