Devil's Advocate: Whose life is it anyway?

Martin Brampton is Martin Brampton and doesn't want anyone else to steal his identity. But why does he think anyone would?

The very first article in this series was about the e-envoy's idea to have each of us carry just one smartcard. It was supposed to serve both government and commercial purposes by homing in on a single agreed standard. But I wanted to hang on to my awkward collection of plastic cards rather than place my life in the hands of just one small piece of silicon.

It is now looking as if my qualms were fully justified. The proponents of the technology were fulsome in their talk of the convenience and efficiency of a single smartcard standard. But now there is talk of security flaws in the cards, such that one might be vulnerable to having one's identity stolen. I don't at all like the sound of that. If I weren't me, who would I be?

Maybe we would all be swapping identities. Perhaps I could be Sven-Goran Eriksson. No, on second thoughts, I think someone who knows something about football should manage the England team. I heard that England won a game the other day but I'm not sure that is enough to make Sven's job easy. Perhaps I could be Bill Gates but I wouldn't know what to do with that amount of wealth. Anyway, there would probably be a queue of people wanting to swap with famous people, and I would find that the only identities left over were ones that really didn't suit me.

If the e-envoy ever has his way and provides us all with smartcards, they could be the key to online voting. If stolen identities take off, that could lead to interesting shifts in voting patterns. Just as the 'dead vote' has sometimes influenced elections significantly, we could get to a situation where the 'stolen identity' vote becomes the critical factor. It might be just the thing to reawaken interest in elections, but it probably is not what the government has in mind when it worries about low turnouts.

There is something slightly threatening about the word 'security' but we do need the technology we use to be safe. That seems to be harder than one might think. Until recently, I was quite impressed with the progress made in biometrics, identifying people by some part of their body. But now a patient Japanese man has demonstrated that he can make artificial fingers out of gelatine for less than US$10 a time. He can put other people's fingerprints on them and they are good enough to fool current testing systems. I wonder how you make artificial eyeballs for $10?

Aggregating information would be effective and perhaps tidier. I have my Ericsson PDA (even though it won't communicate with my PC) and it contains all sorts of information. The security is rudimentary and I don't doubt that there are people who could extract the data quite easily. Yet apparently one of the most popular uses of such gadgets is to store passwords and PIN numbers. Most of us have lost a PDA at one time or another and a smartcard would be even easier to forget.

It seems as though the security issues raised by modern technology baffle businesses. Consultants say that projects have poorly defined security requirements and attribute this to the fact that the issues are simply too complex for most people. The same problem arises with outsourcing, where few contracts are written with sufficient attention paid to the safe keeping of information. If businesses cannot cope, what hope is there for the private individual? Think carefully before you commit your life to just one small piece of silicon.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He is a frequent contributor to silicon.com's Behind the Headlines TV programme and can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.