First week at Mozilla: Identity

So, it is my first week at Mozilla Labs; I picked a great first week - the launch of Firefox 4 for both desktop and mobile.

One of the big topics for Mozilla is Identity and Privacy. After all, "Firefox answers to no one but you." However, digging into identity (above the layer of authentication and authorization) is a tricky business.

This book is a very interesting framework in which to think of identity. It is intuitive social science: we all have expectations about how our personal information should be used, based on the context of use; when our expectations are not met, we react poorly; when our expectations are stressed, but not broken, expectations may evolve, especially to encapsulate new technologies.

Contextual Integrity is the catch phrase to encompass this idea...and the idea that identity/Privacy is not about hiding your information, but about its appropriate use.

The difficulty is turning a social science into a computer science. There has been lots of follow on work on Contextual Integrity, using temporal and other logics. They give the foundations for how to implement a system, but really it is the system inputs which are problematic. The biggest issue, of course, is establishing context. It is well known that users will not take the time to define contexts, so we need to derive context from activity: browsing, communication, location, etc.

In many ways the browser is the right place to establish context (for your online identity), so I am optimistic that Mozilla can bring (at least parts of) this to life.

Comments

Gliese 581g

So...there is probably intelligent life out there. As the old Monty Python saying goes, "I hope so, cause there certainly isn't much here on earth." Case in point. The video for Gliese581g is on MSNBC, and works fine in IE, but crashes in Chrome [ here ].

Acsoi - Land Grab Economics

"Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income" ( Acsoi ), is a measure of what a companies profits would be if they were not spending like crazy to acquire a space: in GroupOn's case, this would be retailers. To me, using Acsoi as a measure is really an admission that a company has no staying power beyond brand awareness. So, they need to grab and own as much mindshare as they can, as quickly as they can, to increase the barrier to entry for competitors. Without intellectual property to help protect them, and with the cost of switching (for a user) being effectively zero, building a global brand, and relying on brand stickiness, is the best way forward. Companies like Amazon that have been effective at this have also built in other "sticky" factors over time: recommendation engines, one-click purchasing, etc. This increases the cost for the user to switch, and allows the company to stop pouring money into marketing and acquisition costs. You also buil...

Schrodinger's Cat is still Alive...and Dead

With Borders scaling back so many of their stores, I have ended up buying more books than I normally would. One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis. It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at. Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life . One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule; Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work. Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging. Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book. While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak. Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against....

Todd G. Simpson

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