The problem in the Age of Social isn't exactly what's in the headlines of the media. The media talks about privacy, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is the on-going commoditization of your identity on sites like Facebook. Sites like that exploit your privacy to entice new users to join because the more users they have the more money they make. That means they continue to push your limits of comfort with what is shared. Sometimes they push too far and people start to quit so they figure out ways to repackage but not really change anything. That's what Facebook had to do recently, but Facebook is good at letting you communicate with your friends, I won't deny that. It's paid for by advertising to you and by you letting them use anything you post or upload as advertising for them.

However, the issue of your identity isn't anything new or something that even started with Facebook. It's been happening for quite a while. You go to a site that you enjoy and want to participate in and maybe make some comments, but the only way to do that is to register. It's the same way you've registered at fifty thousand sites before. You've been scattering your identity all over the internet already, Facebook was just nice enough to come along and really highlight the problem.

If you're like me you've always wondered why you can't use the same ID to log in to at any site. Actually there have been people trying to solve this problem for awhile too. That's why OpenID was built, but OpenID hasn't been successful for the same reason you're angry with Facebook. Unless you own the server you don't own your OpenID. You have to find an OpenID provider like Google or Yahoo, and we're back to square one.

So how do we fix the Age of Social? You have to be in control of your identity, and I hate to break it to you but it's not going to be free(or at least currently I can't think of a way that's possible). So you just have to think of it like it's your driver's license for the web. There's a nominal price to renew your license and there is a nominal fee to host your identity. It's worth it though. It's worth it to not have Facebook or anyone else to have control of what people see of you. Facebook does want to be your identity though and they're trying hard, but do you really want a closed-source private company owning you? Obviously that was rhetorical. Most people won't except this. Facebook is a great communication tool, but not a great identity tool, and that's how it should stay. When your identity isn't completely up to you as to how you would like to present yourself it leaves you open to interpretation. Interpretation that can really harm you. Have you ever heard a story on the news of how "private" pictures on Facebook got out and helped someone? No, the story usually ends with someone not getting a job or worse fired from a current one.

That's just the present. There's also the future you need to worry about. The Internet of Things is coming. The Internet of Things, for those that don't know, is basically your "dumb devices" like a refrigerator or coffee maker accessible through the internet. The question is how are we going to control them? The scariest future is that Facebook owns all our identities, and that we have to log in to Facebook to schedule our morning coffee to be ready. Now let's assume Zuckerberg no longer asks his friends which dumbfuck user's information they want to see and grown out of hacking people's email, and give him the benefit of the doubt he's being honest about caring about people's privacy, I still don't want anyone but me controlling my identity. It makes me extremely uneasy, to say the least, that they would start cataloging our day-to-day habits outside of web. That's why we need to be worried about more than just our privacy. When we own our identity we'll have our privacy.