That elusive privacy

Craig Burton amused me recently by demonstrating conclusively that my use of a digital birthday for non-disclosure reasons couldn't survive social networking for longer than five digital minutes!  Here's what he says about it in his new wordpress blog (and he's setting up infocard login as we speak)…

Pamela Dingle pointed this post out to me early in Sept. We both decided not to write about it and make fun of Kim and Jackson for violating privacy guidelines so blatantly. But Kim got a good laugh out of my pointing that out so – while late – here it is. Pictures, dates the whole thing. Who cares about privacy anyway eh?

Kim’s Birthday Party

August 31st was Kim Cameron’s birthday. Yours truly got to cook the “meat blob” that was served along with a wonderful platter of Mediterranean halibut. Ian, Kim’s brother and his wife came down from Vancouver to partake in the festivities. I hadn’t seen Ian in years so it was great to catch up with him.

Below is a picture of Jennifer Wu, Kim and myself enjoying some of Jennifer’s Chinese dumplings. The three of us worked together at ZOOMIT. Jennifer was responsible for the directory synchronization and metadirectory engine and moved to Washington with the rest of us after the acquisition of ZOOMIT by Microsoft. She’s moved over to work on the “Indigo” team now.

As usual the food was awesome, the wine was great and the company was exceptional.

Jackson’s Identity Management & Active Directory Reality Tour Travelblog: Happy Birthday Kim!

Something tells me Dave Kearns will find this mildly amusing, since when I first wrote about using a digital birthday, he said:

I’m just so much more trusting than you Canucks! Just another naive Yankee, willing to fork over his real birthday when someone asks.

By the way, thanks for the pink gin, Kim (at least that’s what it looks like) – but if it really wasn’t your birthday, I want the doughnut back!

The reference was to a digital donut he had sent me to celebrate my digital birthday.

Anyway, all I'll say is that my goal wasn't to prevent my friends from finding out my birthday – it was to prevent robots from using my birthday as a key for assembling information about me.  So even if the robots read Jackson's blog (which I'm sure the smarter ones do), and even if those robots can decode roman numerals inscribed in icing (which is probably not very common), my identity record at Facebook will still not join through trivial automated processes to my records on other internet repositories, and this gives me some (very small) pleasure.

Published by

Kim Cameron

Work on identity.