Appendix
Through the Lens of Research
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
—Albert Szent-Györgyi, scientist
Identity is a topic rich with nuance. A research approach attempting to study it requires the same nuance. Our journey began with in-depth interviews among experts in the fields of security, privacy, and image as viewed from a technology or behavioral vantage point. After probing the professionals, we studied the average consumer—more than 60 of them across 30 households, to be exact. We cohabitated for hours with these subjects, watching them live their lives and asking questions to ground the enormity of the topic at hand. We wanted to know how these individuals see themselves in a networked-community age and the role of technology in influencing the same. Our subjects freely exposed their concerns, aspirations, and questions during this process, providing rich fodder for the quantitative phase that followed. This latter phase explored the attitudes and behaviors among more than 5,000 connected consumers in the United States. Because identity is hardly a topic that is black or white, we forced these respondents to make tough choices about the types of services and policy decisions that could potentially ameliorate the ambiguity so common in today’s networked-community age, while mitigating the downsides inherent in any given approach.
The evidence acquired through this year-long process provided the framework for this ...
