Its this nakedness that may begin to foster a new humanity. Afterall when people can see that we are all concerned with similar issues, share similar passions and values it serves to bring people closer together. At the same time, it also opens up the discussion for what makes us different, separates us and generates new possibilities for discussion.

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/01/the_filter_who__1.html

I completely agree with you, Piers, that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying.

However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) “red coat, black coat” analogy, but don’t spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor’s New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the “naked identity” of the wearer.

Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?

We can never really be sure what’s what or who’s who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.

We can never really be sure what’s what or who’s who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job – you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I’d bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you’ll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.

Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.

Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.

Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friend’s opinions of other friends and so on.

In our series of 2007 Trends articles we wrote in Privacy Epiphany about the idea that many of us will wake up to the fact that our privacy is dead. Here’s a video called ‘Google’s Masterplan’ that reflects the growing concerns about our privacy.