Jon Udell, in a return visit to the Gillmor Gang, shares his vision for a future in which we control our own identity and digital content:

“What I ultimately want is for people to be born and to be given a social security number and to also be given control over some chunk of space in the cloud, some chunk of name space. And for all the stuff that they care about throughout their life to be there, controlled by them, and for the access to that stuff to be syndicated out in a controlled fashion so that…

Just for example, right now we expect people to manage their photos on Flickr and manage their health records on Health Vault or Google Health. And manage this, that and the other on this, that or the other service in the cloud. Right?

And the notion is that each of these things is kind of like this vault that you put your stuff into. And I really would love to flip that model around, and I would love the model to be that I’m me and this is sort of the cloud extension of me. And it has this stuff in it that I put there.

And then I define who has access to it and where that information flows or syndicates to and on what terms. And what that means is, that when I decide that I want to share something to my friends and family, I say one time what my definition of friends and family is. It’s not my Flickr definition of friends and family versus my Live Mesh definition of Friends and Family versus yadda, yadda, yadda.

I have a policy which I assert over my stuff that I control, which is this protected zone in the cloud. And I have some real control over how I define policies over that thing and who gets access to it and on what terms. And I get to audit that access in a coherent way.”

Udell then points out that there are two types of data here:

“So…why…does Flickr bundle together the notion of storage and archiving with the notion of social interaction with my photos?

Those are actually, in my view, separable concerns. I actually should be able to outsource the storage and archiving to some other provider. And in fact, there should be a range of providers that are making offers to me and there should be a sort of tiered set of offering there. Because right now, my digital photos, the stuff I’ve taken on digicams the last 10 years, I feel are less likely to be available to my grandkids than the shoebox that I have on the floor next to me which has photos from my grandparents era.”

While Jon’s statement seems silly on the face of it, given that you (in theory) can have as many copies of digital content as you want…he has a point. If you’ve cultivated your photos and access controls in a single service over many years…you really don’t have many copies…you have only one. And without the ability to easily get a copy, combined with the current volatility of Yahoo (Flickr’s co-founders just announced they’re leaving Yahoo), Jon turns what should be a silly notion into a very real concern going forward.

Mozilla’s Brendan Eich responds that to reach Jon’s vision it’s going to “require standardization of things like identity and secure JavaScriptable social network mashups”. This would allow people to use their identity data securely in various contexts, so they can keep their privacy and control intact across services.

Of course, decoupling identity and picture data isn’t necessary to make sure they’re saved for the long term, but it would make them much more easy to control and delegate, which would help. If we had standardization for identity data we could at least create backups (or sync) across services, storing copies for the day that our primary service provider goes black so we can switch to another one.

But an even simpler way to help get this started, one that we could implement right now as standards mature, would be for all services that store identity data to merely let their users export it freely in already-existing formats. That rainy-day copy might not work with other services yet, but at least we would be able to print it out and store it in a shoebox for safe keeping.