{"id":33,"date":"2014-02-13T22:10:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-13T22:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.insideout.io\/en\/?p=33"},"modified":"2014-02-13T22:10:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-13T22:10:00","slug":"identity-trusted-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.insideout.io\/en\/2014\/02\/13\/identity-trusted-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Online identity – My Body is My Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not an activist and I am not paranoid about others looking at my data trails before hiring me or starting a new business.<\/p>\n

The first time I went online was over a bulletin board system run by the school\u2019s system administrator – who eventually became a good friend of mine – when I was living in a small town a few miles from Madison, Wisconsin. It was 1994 and I was attending my senior year in high school. Raised in Rome, Italy I had the opportunity to travel abroad and get my high school diploma in the US. Like many of you, I make a living online and the Web is my office.<\/p>\n

If you are a nerd, my story shouldn\u2019t be too different from yours. My nickname on the Internet has always been cyberandy, first on CompuServe, then AOL, and on everything else from there. As vintage as it sounds, cyberandy is the result of a generation that grew up with cyberpunk writers and sci-fi movies, before finding itself\u00a0digitised\u00a0at 360 degrees, producing 5 Exabytes every two days – until 2003 this was the amount of data produced by all of humankind and now it only takes 48 hours – and way beyond what Philip Dick and Terry Gilliam had taught us.<\/p>\n

Here is a photo of me when I was 3 years old.<\/p>\n

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It was taken by my parents at my grandparents\u2019 beach house in a small fishing village called Marzocca, in the Marche region right in the center of Italy.<\/p>\n

The photo was shot by my dad using a 35mm film – \u201cold media\u201d atom based recording, right? – and I\u2019m glad I can still see it several years after.<\/p>\n

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Here is the ultra-sound portrait photo of Michele Leroy in my friend\u2019s \u00a0 belly, shared using WhatsApp and saved on my Android phone. Will it be there when Michele Leroy is my age or will it simply be put up for sale by WhatsApp since most of us refused to pay for the App?<\/p>\n

In 2012, in his closing remarks at SXSW, Bruce Sterling (a well known guru for my generation – brucesterling<\/a> on Twitter) talked for the first time about the \u201cStacks,\u201d referring to Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, and he explained:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. how their online business model is constructed: users shall remain within each brand software\/hardware stack, enjoy free services, and then their self-generated data will either be sold to advertisers or be bought back by the user;<\/li>\n
  2. why they will eventually collapse: they simply don\u2019t generate enough value other than storing, augmenting and re-selling personal data they don\u2019t have any right to use.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    At that time I began moving along his line and, and following @matteoc\u2019s intuition, we opened a discussion with an amazing think tank of freethinkers, actors, managers, philosophers, nerds and academics about what our identity really is, how it will evolve in the future and what technology we need to protect it while bringing it to the next level (meaning, beyond the smiling portrait we have on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).<\/p>\n

    My curiosity for this topic grew and here is a list of dots I\u2019ve been connecting so far together with the think tank:<\/p>\n