Every now and then, inevitably, the debate sparks again in the digital identity community as to what is “identity,” what is “digital identity,” and whether we can have several identities or only one, etc. In this last year week occurrence of the discussion, I’ve come to understand – tentatively – a number of confusions that are being made. I felt that different dimensions of a conceptual set (if not different concepts) are conflated in the way people are loosely using them in the discussion.
Identity: set of attributes that allow to recognize a thing or set of things as unique or distinct. Key variables: distinction, uniqueness.
Identical – key features: sameness or more precisely similarity (two identical things are still two things, at least in time and/or space.)
Identification: matching attributes to the thing or set of things they are asserted about (keyword: matching)
Digital Identity: a digital representation, namely through attributes aka identifiers, of an “identity” (as per above) or of a thing in a certain context (non-unique due to what I call the mirror effect of digital technologies: what is the difference (practically) between the file I just created and its copy in my colleague’s mailbox to whom I sent it as email attachment, or between the nice shots I took last week in Beijing and their replica on my hard drive, and those uploaded on flickr or facebook?)
“Thing” here means anything that can be represented: subject, object, idea, etc. So “digital identity” can be multiple while “identity” (by entity or “thing”) remains unique.
One fellow pointed out that “it is important to differentiate between digital identities that do have virtual personality human rights, and digital identities which do not have virtual personality human rights.” This is a legislation Costa Rican lawyers have developed and which has been voted by their Congress. Warning that English speaking lawyers may have to decide on a different wording for the concept, he specified that personality is here to be understood in a legal sense, not psychological. We need not to forget that the legislation has been developed in Spanish (also in French legal materials, “legal entity” is often designated “moral person,” an entity (“person”) whose legal existence is defined on a non-material or non-physical bases, while the human individuals are called “physical person.”)
So are we going to have a layer of individual entities, social life, jurisdiction, and legislation on top of the “first order” of those same things we’ve known so far? Or if we just extend the first world/order jurisdiction and legislation to include and apply to the second world/order, how much responsible I will be hold for the action of my digital person? How are the consequences of my digital person assessed – by the harm they cause in the digital world, or their impact on the physical world, or in a third fiction dimension made up with a mix of both?
