The Domains of Identity
I’m really excited about our new book series kicking-off with @IdewntityWoman in the spring of 2020 @AnthemPress.
Overwhelmed with excitement, The Domains of Identity are a commencement of thought leadership from our Anthem Ethics of Personal Data Collection series and has been more than twenty years in the making. Kaliya Young has been a trailblazer in the codification of the industry that we call Personal Data and our understanding of identity across every fragment of our diversity. Having dedicated my own career to asking questions like, “what is data”, and the industrial space of personal data in particular this book as much a historical reference point as it is a seminal reference point of what we consider to be evidence of the existence of our personhood.
The groundbreaking history of this book is embodied equally in my opinion by its contents and its creator. Because it is my pleasure to do so, I have to shed light on the influence that this woman has had on transforming a genre of thought about the internet, cyber space, personhood, privacy, protection, capitalism, corporatization, publicization (new word) and privatization of the evidence of our lives and the communities in which they exist.
My journey into this space of data sovereignty and data value started via The Data Union who was succeeded by a trade association called the International Personal Data Trade Association, and it was preceded by the oldest digital asset trade association the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. Born out of the Dot-Com era and into the 21st Century, all of these orgs were mothered by Kaliya Young who later became The Identity Woman as an internet tag to differentiate her from the others writing on topics of digital and non-digital data.
The Domains of Identity are as important to this time as our early laws of physics; in that, how we understand our ability to move forward with the codification of our existence will have to be designed with the human’s autonomy and choice first or we’ll run the risk of automate everything that makes us human. This text’s election was deliberate and hopeful, as we did not know if Kaliya would agree to participate. I’d like to give a special thanks to James “Jim” Pasquale of our editorial board. He is an original cowboy of the data ecosystems and subject-matter-expert at interoperability of data, leading with “interoperability is more than just the ability for individuals to take their data along with them, and more about freedom of choice for individuals seamlessly moving data in and out of other ecosystems, platforms, including those based on Blockchains. It has an intrinsic value to both sides of the B2C (business-to-customer) and C2B (customer-to-business) equation. Some refer to this as hyper-relevance, but it is more about putting customers first, starting with trust around data”. Jim was first to recommend Kaliya to start this series because of her lectures in the late 2010s.
As we consume The Domains of Identity it is necessary to consider data itself as a tangible dynamic non-rivalrous good that is only valuable in caucus with communities, but with special regard for the individual to be able to exist holistically within a community with rigidity and agency. Without adding to the obfuscation of a relatively new topic, I think it necessary to suggest that we all stick to the cultural basics when applying this text: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
