Who are you really?
Jinfo Blog

24th August 2009

By Diana Nutting

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Here’s two new sources to control your internet identity. ReallyWho.com (http://www.reallywho.com) has released an online identity verification service that has brought the public records identity verification technology used by financial institutions to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media websites. The ReallyWho technology uses information generated from public and commercial records to formulate questions that can only be affirmed by the person being verified. The market for a company like ReallyWho opened after a series of Twitter impostors cropped up over the summer, impersonating famous people. It doesn't cost anything to find someone on ReallyWho.com and verify his or her identity, but for a US$5 yearly fee, users can get a verified profile with links to Facebook and other social networking sites. At the same time, a new project from the MIT Media Lab called Personas (http://personas.media.mit.edu/) will create a data portrait of your online identity. You simply enter your name and it searches the Web for information and context and computes a visual representation of how the Internet sees you. It works by searching the web for information about the name you enter, and attempts to fit the person to a pre-determined set of categories that an algorithmic process has created from a huge body of data. The output looks like a multicoloured striped ribbon. The wider the ribbon, the more information there is about you, using categories such as books, management, news, internet, legal, professional.

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