Excellent argument. The more identities we maintain, the better.

Stephen

I (Kevin Cox) agree with you with respect to the idea of multiple identities. My argument is not against federated identities it is in fact a plea for federated identities. I clearly did not explain myself properly. What we are proposing follows all of Cameron's "Laws of Identity".

The practical problem we need to solve is the administrative one for controlling all these different federated identities as they proliferate. There is no doubt that there is one me even though I take on multiple roles. The implementation model we suggest is one where I have a way of referring to, knowing about and controlling my different federated identities.

We do not propose a central database of identities. We propose a way to link these identities together through the person to whom they refer.

This linking together of different identities gives us the security we need as it does in real life. If someone forges my signature then I use my other relationships to prove that it was unlikely to be my signature on the document. The error rate of an individual biometric is not important. It is the combined error rate of all our identities that matters.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON IDENTITY AS EXPRESSED IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
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The British sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote that a person's identity is "not to be found in behaviour, nor in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going." That person must continually integrate events and sort them into an ongoing story about the self. He must, and in this case the self is a 'he', "have a notion of how he has become who he is and where he is going." There is a process of selecting and of discarding memories, a partly robust and partly fragile set of feelings and self-identity. As I keep my story going, as I posit some degree of unity and continuity over time, some degree of autonomy and responsibility, I describe the somebody I have become, the doer-deciding, not being decided for, the person who thinks, wills and acts.

Perhaps Sir Francis Drake put it more strikingly and eloquently in his prayer:

O Lord God!
When Thou givest to Thy servants
to endeavour any great matter,
Grant us to know that it is
not the beginning
But the continuing of the same
to the end,
Until it be thoroughly finished,
Which yieldeth the true glory…..

part two of my comments on 'identity':
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Autobiography is interpretive self-history and an interpretive self-history that goes on until one’s last breaths. It is a dialogue with time and I have spent various periods of more than twenty-four years(1984-2008) trying to give my experience a cast, a shape, and make a coherent intervention into my past not just write a chronicle of elapsed events. As I do this I find I nourish the past, anticipate the future and face unavoidable existential realities like death, my own limitations and failures. While my account is ostensibly about myself, I like to think that it becomes, in the end, about the reader. For there is a complex symbiosis here between me and you and the many readers not yet born.

"I'll live in this poor rime," as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 107. Every writer worth his salt likes to think, hopes, as the Bard wrote in the last couplet of this sonnet, that

...................thou in this shalt find
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent