I'd say now more than ever we are benefiting from the wealth of information on the Web whether or not it comes from a credible person in the media or some thirteen year old in his mom's basement. The point is, you should never read something somewhere, from a "credible" source or not, and take it as dogma. That's a really short sighted way to gather information, and sometimes it takes the least credible person out there to open your eyes to something you wouldn't have learned from a well-known media publication. That being said, we can currently take steps, as one of the other posts points out, to gather background on our online sources. Then, it's up to us to determine what the facts are according to our own standards.

Based on your post, it seems that as we make the transition to Web 3.0 and then Web 4.0 and beyond, we're going to have to become much more exposed before further enabling privacy controls. This is troubling since we're already daunted by privacy issues in Web 2.0.

I'm reminded of what a high-school teacher taught me.

 There are three way's you learn about someone;

1. What they do;
2. What they say; and
3. What is said about them

In that order.

So maybe we have a choice.  Either we don't care what someone does or we need a service (presumably a google app like everything else) that shows us everything they do.

Btw : I agree with the sentiment that it is better to have a bit of faith than to be sceptical.

Let's take a step back. The intent of this article is that in order for us to trust information we find on the Internet, we have to be able to verify the identity of who provided it. But does that give us any guarantees? Even if you know the identity of a person or entity who has provided a piece of information, would you always rely on that information to be true? People will tell you things they have heard or read somewhere, but maybe their source was wrong, or maybe they misundertood something. I've always said that the only two pieces of information in any newspaper you can rely on to be true are the date and its price.

If you know someone in person, you know their background, area of expertise, etc. So if that person makes a statement, you can more or less decide for yourself how much faith you want to have in the information. But even if you know someone only by an alias on a web forum you may still decide, based on the different postings by this person, that the information provided has a certain degree of reliability. In the end, whether the information comes from a friend, a coworker, or from wartsrus on a forum on skin conditions, if the information appears useful I might be able to do something with it. If my use of that information has large consequences, e.g. buying an expensive piece of equipment, I'd want to verify it from different sources anyway, regardless of who provided the information. I don't make such a big distinction between authoritative and user-contributed content.

 

Interesting subject for discussion, how trust, privacy and identity become intermingled on the web. 

With regards to your discussion on Web 3.0 and this notion of asserted identity everywhere, I think we need to be very clear on what identity online means.  We all have an Identity - a notion of who we believe we are - and increasingly this exists in a physical and virtual world.

However, when it comes to "identifying" someone there are different levels.  There is the physical nature of who I am, which is marked by my DNA, my retina, my fingerprints, etc  which is inviolate and uniquely identifies the my core.  Secondly, there is the clothes and behaviours I chose to wrap around the physical form - these are my personalities.  Each of my personalities has a different presentation, a different history, even a different language (i.e personality at a pub, personality at work, personality with my wife, personality with my mistress...if I had one - relax honey).

In an online world, we all have multiple different personalities or "personas" with which we act.  We do things online at work differently to what we do at home.  And we assert those personalities differently, different logins, usernames, etc.  Just becuase I have a gmail account which can track me everywhere doesn't mean I dont have a hotmail account which can track me everywhere else.

This creates a challenge when coulpled with the open/trusted nature of the internet and increasing level of user-generated content being imbued with trust and constantly referenced.  Reputation can only be associated with a persona, or role, that an individual chooses to emply, be it with malicious intent or not.

This is not an intractable problem, it is solvable but it raises a dilemma; do we want to be able to track every user-generated item back to it's true physical source, or do we want to retain an open and anonymous internet?

Answering this question will be necessary as society increasingly depends on the web and the technology becomes feasible.  The choices that are made will have indelible impacts on the way we live our lives in the future.

I pretty much agree that my past ramblings are here to stay. However, if we ever have the sort of 100% verifiable online identity that I'm predicting will be an important part of solving a bunch of Web 2.0's problems, we're going to need to have absolute control over how and where our personal data is used going forward. This would apply, I imagine, to whether we allow comments we post on other people's blogs to be spiderable, for example.

You made a comment about wanting to find a service that will scrub your data from the thousands of nodes to which it has spread. I think that such a service could be possible but only with agreements in place with the content hosts as this third party would be overriding user level security to delete someone else's content.

Also, this would not take into account the myriad archival tools that are not alterable by their nature as a historic record. I can find references and quotes to things I posted in 1985 kicking around out there still. I have a friend (who is a young business professional, making her way up the corporate ladder) who has been trying to rid the web of her high school angelfire page where she has green hair and calls herself pathetic. After many months, she was able to convince angelfire to take the page down, but the photo is still kicking around and accessible via the wayback machine and still getting shared amongst coworkers.

I think it is more likely that you will be able to completely anonymize your current footprint, but I doubt you will be able to erase your past footprints and trail. So far, nothing (at least as far as text goes) really seems to go away.