Identity management for self-portrayal

Abstract

Identity management systems help users to organise their digital profiles in order to communicate parts of them, whenever needed and wanted, to communication partners like internet services or personal contacts. Most current identity management research tries to achieve the highest possible degree of data hiding for best privacy. After sketching some of these projects, this paper presents a different approach where users are assumed to be interested in presenting themselves to selected online communities or internet services for better personalisation, to achieve a consistent reputation, or to establish an application- and service-independent internet society. It thereby stresses the aspect of privacy that persons have the option for self-portrayal. To support this thesis, a survey is presented which shows that many users who actively participate in Internet communities would make high use of such a system. Finally, the project "onefC" is presented which prototypically realises this approach. © 2004 by International Federation for Information Processing.