"This is a discussion of the eight realities of technology and social experience that are shaping the world of today's teens and twenty-somethings.

It looks at the growing role of technology in teens' lives, the way they use their gadgets, their expectations about how to find and use information, and the social consequences of their use of technology."

by Lee Rainie Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project

Blogging has grown the sum total of our knowledge exponentially. The Fraud Files is an example of a narrowly focused, neatly done blog that draws down on the expertise of the solo practitioner writer, who is the company and knowledge centre.

To find the range of know how and breadth of detail on this blog you'd have to subscribe to an accountants magazine. How interesting would that be?

Today, we keep an eye on this issues this site raises by RSS and occasional surfing and yet be in touch with the problems and issues in a way previously unimaginable. It's  part of a expanding superset of knowledge. Thing is that the superset is exploding as the Tracy Coenen's, Ms FraudFiles, of this world keep newly arriving on the net, but determined to put up their specialized knowledge on the web, and thus to work.

Oh, and by the way, there's clearly a disturbingly large array of fraud, business and otherwise out there. Sadly, this site has way too much material to write about. Engrossing in a peverse way.

Mark Pincus has an interesting piece on his blog (which I have added to the Perceptric Blog list now) about why My Space has been succeeding and why Friendster has been failing.

He touches in his piece about something that I find very interesting and worth further exploration:

Where does online presence and online security begin and end?

My personal view is that the battle for keeping information private was lost a few years back. There are no secrets in the on line world... A lot of people may disagree with me, but I think that the battle to maintain security over personal data is as likely to be won as the record companies are as likely to stop people from file sharing.

Where this is going in my opinion is to us all needing to generate personal aka's which will become on line avatars. We will create new personas online that will be the sponsors of the intelligent agents and bots that we send out to do our research. Soon we will all want to and maybe need to have new and alternate identities - particularly if we have a point of view about something that is radically different to our friends, neighbours or employers....

I see this including us having custom made voices that we will use on phone calls - shouldn't be too difficult to create an algorithm that is included into skype or your 3G phone that will mask your real voice and give you a new identity. And since the most likely people to want to have new identities are people who are either criminals or in government secret agencies (and maybe some of those are the same anyway!) it's possible this is happening already....

Who owns the information about where you go, what you look at, or do, or for how long on the internet?  The information's valuable. It allows advertisers to target you. it allows outsiders to understand your interest and personalities. It means someone get to know you; either individually (follow the clicks) or as a class, (people who visit Amazon, Perceptric and the New Yorker) And beyond the current cookie counter operations if we get into understanding that you spend a hour at Perceptric, and an hour at the New Yorker, and no time at NASCAR, we get a clue to what makes you tick. See now? Pure Gold.

Attention Trust.org launched to deal with this issue. The organization wants internet users to own their own data set about attention. Naturally, Wednesday, Google announced they were moving into the field. Why not? They want to sell highly and precisely targeted ads. They won't be the last to try and take the field either.

Some people will care passionately about this, others not. But there have been great discussion pieces including at Transparent Bundles , ZDNet, Scobleizer (Microsoft viewpoint) and others.

There has been precisely nothing in any of the major media outlets. Yet right now, attention is the cutting edge of where the web will go, how it will develop, who will pay for it and what service we will or won't see.

Instant messaging is great. We can't live without it. Kids have thirty conversations going all over the world. But, in a corporate environment do you know who you're talking to. Something about IM says this is secure. The other person is logged on, right? But are they?

Yesterday, we witnessed an entertaining conversation via IM with one side (the 12 yr old) completely fooling the other into thinking he was a corporate colleague. (up until the emoticons started flowing and the 12 yr old humor hit the screen) Nothing lost really. Except. It could have been a more intimate or vital corporate conversation where details were revealed, or discussed, that made a big difference. 

How do you guarantee, without seeing, that the person you IM is the person you want? It's part of the identity problem we all face in the digital wired world. Given that we are all IMing a lot more these days, it's a problem set to grow. 

There is a growing concern in Australia about rights of individuals. The government wants to get legislation through parliament prior to Christmas that will enable the powers that be to be able to shoot to kill if someone runs away that they are trying to apprehend.

This is not only about rights though. It is about identity. If we could feel safe that when we say we are who we are, we would be believed, some of this paranoia would go away. However, we have seen recently from the killing of the Brazilian man in London who was thought to be a terrorist, that in the adrenalin rush and the lack of precise knowledge about people - particularly those who have a different 'look' to ourselves - that people can be wrongly identified and pursued and killed.

The real concern is how to clearly be able to communicate to others - particularly anyone with a gun in their hand, but others too, that we are who we say we are. There is an implicit need to develop social and technological tools that will enable this.

Where will these tools come from? How can we be sure that they will help us prevent identity theft, prevent incorrect identification....?

I was at the local liquor store up in Bondi Junction this afternoon. The guy in front of me spent $1,000 and wanted to put it on his black Amex card. He didn't have ID. He told the people behind the counter that they should trust him because he had a black Amex, and therefore his credit was good.

He ended up walking out of the story with his booze....

Of course he got everyone focusing on the wrong issue. It wasn't about whether his credit was good. It was about whether his identity was real.

Banks all around the world along with governments are concerned about this issue. But individuals should be even more concerned. Particularly in an environment where governments are striving to enact laws that diminish or destroy individual freedoms.With an enormous burden of proof being placed on individuals, people are going to have to start figuring out how to prove that they are indeed themselves.