Gies states:
The rhetoric of digital disembodiment is manifestly at odds with the increased use of surveillance technologies which are rendering the body more traceable than ever before. p.316 citing Aas, 2006
Since 9/11 national border security has been computerized so that passports have a digital signature. In the States, visitors have their fingerprints taken and photography has been used on exiting visitors at the UK border and they are experimenting with iris identification. DNA samples are used on a regular basis to identify criminals and CCTV is ominpresent in the UK, monitoring our movements in public spaces and is regularly used in criminal investigation. So Gies’ statement rings true in our everyday experiences. The body is the source of identification.
He also states:
it would be wrong to suggest that it is only now that the material body is becoming fully relevant in online interactions. Embodied communication has always been present on the internet: even before broadband technology brought a global multimedia complex into the home, text-based discourse on the Internet already revolved around discursive markers capable of revealing the identity of users. p. 317
Gies argues that the way we use language reveals us online in terms of education, class, nationality and possibly gender. But there are other behavioural biometrics that can identify us. Handwriting has a long history of identifying individuals. We do not reveal our handwriting online but we do reveal our keystroke behaviour. Apparently, during the Second World War British female codebreakers learned the ’voices’ of the German telegraph transmitters. This enabled them to identify important or false information. Keystroke dynamics focus on the ‘flight time’ – the time it takes to move from one key to another, and the ‘dwell time’ – the time one spends on any one key. (MIS Biometrics wiki http://misbiometrics.wikidot.com/keystroke)
There are other behavioural biometrics that can be used to trace us online. It is also possible to recognize someone online by the strategy, knowledge and skill used in interacting with a piece of software. There are also indirect human-computer interactions that can be analyzed such as system call traces, audit logs, program execution traces, registry access, storage activity etc. (Yampolskiy, R. and Govindaraju (2010), V. Taxonomy of Behavioural Biometrics – http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/excerpts/34647.pdf). A problem with a number of these is that they can generate too much information to sift through. For example, an audit log can contain CPU and I/O usage, number of connections from each location, whether a directory was accessed, a file created, another user ID changed, audit record was modified, amount of activity for the system, network and host. (Yampolskiy and Govindaraju 2010 quoting Lunt 1993) However, Yampolskiy and Govindaraju suggest that a random sample of these might be sufficient to distinguish normal behaviour from suspicious behaviour. Yampolskiy and Govindaraju point out that a lot of effort is being put into developing behavioural biometrics as they are useful for a number of fields including marketing, game theory, security and law enforcement (p. 30).
Gies also points out that it takes a lot of skill to manage an anonymous online identity:
…it is important to point out that identity play is difficult to maintain, even in settings which afford anonymity and disembodiment: pretending to be someone else is hard work and requires considerable cultural competence. p. 318
This was borne out this week by the ’self-outing’ of Belle de Jour who has been blogging since 2003 about her secret life as a prostitute. Her blog was so successful it led to a series of books and a television drama. She is in fact a 34 year old research scientist who was a prostitute for 14 months to support herself while she finished her PhD. Noone was able to discover who she was; there were theories that she was a man, that because of her writing style a number of male writers had been mooted as being her. But in the end, the psychological constraints of maintaining a hidden identity proved too much. As she said in her blog last Sunday:
Belle will always be a part of me. She doesn’t belong in a little box, but as a fully acknowledged side of a real person. The non-Belle part of my life isn’t the only ‘real’ bit, it’s ALL real. Belle and the person who wrote her had been apart too long. I had to bring them back together.
So a perfect storm of feelings and circumstances drew me out of hiding. And do you know what? It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters.
So despite her success in thwarting those who tried to trace Belle and identify who she was, it was the difficulty of maintaining two separate identities that led to revealing herself.
