IB Digital Society 2.3A Defining Identity in Digital Society Notes

2.3A Defining Identity in Digital Society

Identity as a Concept

1. Identity is one of the seven concepts: the lens for how digital systems shape who we are, as individuals, groups, and communities.
2. Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, values, and characteristics that make a person recognisable and distinct, including obvious labels (age, nationality) and quieter things (what you care about, how you speak).
3. Works at three levels at once: individual (own traits, beliefs), group (shared with others of the same interests or goals), community (collective values and cultural norms). Sharing a song can express all three at once.
4. Identity is not fixed: it shifts with context and how others see you (a job interview vs close friends, not dishonest). Digital systems constantly change your context and audience and record signals about you at unmatched scale.

Digital Identity: Your Online Representation

1. Digital identity = the online version of you, assembled from your profiles, posts, and the trail of data you leave. It stands in for you without being the person behind it.
2. Built three ways at once: constructed by your activity (post, like, follow, search); stored, often permanently, on company servers you never see; influenced by the platforms, which decide what is shown, in what format, and to whom.
3. Forms whether you intend it or not: even choosing not to post is a readable signal.
4. Most people run several digital identities (roughly one per platform) that rarely line up; keeping the slices apart is constant, active effort.

The Self You Show vs the Self Inferred

1. A digital identity has two sides that do not always match: the presented identity (on purpose) and the inferred identity (from your behaviour).
2. Presented = curated: chosen username, photo, and posts; can be anonymous or pseudonymous. Valuable control over how audiences see you.
3. Inferred = built from your data without consent: platforms combine taps, location, dwell time, and contacts to guess interests, mood, income, and habits, then act on it and often sell it. You usually cannot see it.
4. The two drift apart: the decisions that affect you (ads, prices, content) are made from the inferred version while the presented one sits unused.
5. Through power: who controls the inferred identity? The person it describes usually has the least say, flipping the assumption that your identity is yours to define.

A Footprint That Persists

1. Digital footprint = the accumulated record of your online presence; hard to erase and it outlasts the moment that created it.
2. Two parts: an active trail you create on purpose (posts, shares) and a passive trail collected in the background (logins, locations, cookies, purchases). Both persist.
3. Larger than expected: it includes metadata (when and where a photo was taken, the device, who you were with, links you followed), invisible to you but readable by the companies that store it.
4. Persistence has an upside and a downside: a lasting record can serve as evidence or memory, yet it can also pin you to an old post. Under the EU's right to be forgotten (part of GDPR), lets people ask search engines to remove results, but it collides with public interest and free expression, so it is settled case by case.

Privacy, Surveillance, and Identity Theft

1. Because a digital identity is detailed and persistent, losing control causes real harm. Three overlapping threats: loss of privacy, surveillance, identity theft.
2. Impacts on real people: monitoring causes anxiety; stolen identities lead to fraud and months of cleanup; leaked information can wreck a reputation, end a job, or expose someone to danger, especially vulnerable groups.
3. Surveillance is not only governments: companies track users across sites, and people monitor each other. Feeling watched causes a chilling effect, where people self-censor.
4. Recent case: Clearview AI scraped billions of public photos to build a facial-recognition identity database; in September 2024 the Dutch data-protection authority fined it €30.5 million. An identity was assembled from people's public traces without their consent.
5. Genuine tension: collecting identity data improves safety and security (fraud detection, finding missing people, public health). The same collection eats into privacy, and no setting gives you all of one without losing some of the other.
6. Contested across cultures: broad camera and data surveillance is accepted with little protest in some safety-first societies, such as extensive public CCTV in China, while in the EU it meets legal limits under GDPR, which treats data protection as a fundamental right.