WORLDBEAT: ID malleability creates virtual-world issues

Virtual worlds are set to further complicate the answers to our most basic questions about identity -- who am I and, for that matter, who are you?

With pundits suggesting that virtual worlds are poised to leave the shores of early usage and begin to set sail toward mass adoption, now's a perfect time to start investigating the changing nature of identity as it becomes much more malleable and amorphous.

"We're just learning what identity is," said John Henry Clippinger, senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, during a debate on digital convergence and identity at a recent all-day virtual worlds conference cohosted by IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.

Vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Novell are coming to the same realization that all technology needs to include a special identity layer that can handle multiple IDs, he added. We'll need to apply various types of identity and authentication to different contexts, ranging from comparatively light security to seriously locked-down policies.

As more people enter virtual worlds and find uses for them in their work, social and home lives, they're likely to adopt a number of virtual personas. There will be times and places where it may be OK or even desirable for people to be anonymous, perhaps in areas where confidential feedback is sought or where knowing specifically who someone is just isn't important. Alongside such anonymity, there will be occasions and locations where any kind of dissimulation about identity is not only wrong, it's a felony, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology. For instance, an adult pretending to be a child so that they can enter a virtual world that's meant to be only for kids.

However, resolving those kinds of problems is less likely to involve law enforcement and more likely to center around the contracts you enter into when becoming a member of a particular virtual world, according to Beth Simone Noveck, a professor of law at the New York Law School. "We'll see the emergence of more sophisticated contract services," she said, so that the residents in a virtual community set the rules on which their world is based and take all the major decisions on the criteria for the entry contract.

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