On the way home from a trip last Fall, with the kid asleep in the back seat of the car, my wife asked me to fill her in on a subject that had preoccupied me over the last several years, yet had remained opaque to her. "Tell me about this whole identity thing", she said.

So I did. I told her about the need many of us saw for identity services that were centered on individuals rather than organizations, about the need to equip individuals with instruments of independence, about changing markets from collections of customer traps to free and open environments where customers and vendors could converse and relate from positions of equal power and autonomy. And so on.

She listened patiently as I ran down the various ideas and offerings forwarded by members of the Identity Gang and others who shared the same concerns. Then she said, "I hear all this as More Identity. I don't want more identity. I want less. When I'm online, I want to be anonymous. I don't want anybody to know who I am until I have a good reason to tell them."

In other words, she wants anonymity to be the default, rather than a lucky grace of occasional circumstance. Also, a decade of experience in the online world gives her no more reason to trust the Powers That Wannabe than she trusts the Powers That Already Be.

In all these respects her position is in agreement with David Weinberger's, which he detailed in Anonymity as the default, and why digital ID should be a solution, not a platform. Here's how he sums it up:

The basic problem is, in my opinion, that the digital ID crew is approaching this as a platform issue. Most places on the Web have solved the identity problem sufficiently for them to operate. Some ask for the three digits on the back of your credit card. Some only sign you up if you confirm an email. Some only let you on if you can convince an operator you know the name of your first pet and the senior year season record of your high school's football team. Sites come up with solutions as needed.

Good. Local solutions to local problems are less likely to change norms and defaults. But the push is on for an identity management platform. It's one solution — federated, to be sure — that solves all identity problems at once. If you want to change a social default, build a platform. That's not why they're building it, but that will (I'm afraid) be the effect. It's not enough that anonymity be possible or permitted by the platform. The default isn't about what's permitted but about what's the norm. If the default changes to being naked at the beach, saying, "Well, you can cover up if you want to," doesn't hide the fact that wearing a bathing suit now feels way different. Yes, there's something wrong - and distracting - about the particulars of this analogy. But I think the overall point is right: We're talking about defaults, not affordances.

There are serious problems caused by weaknesses in current identity solutions. Identity theft is nothing to sneer at, for example. But are we sure we want to institute a curfew instead of installing better locks?

Well, I've never pushed for one platform, and I don't think anybody working on solving identity problems for individuals is doing that either. In fact, most of the proposed (and in some cases working) technologies at hand are approaches to what David calls local problems. Microsoft's CardSpace is a way for individuals to manage their ends of the many different identities they bring to many different relationships online. It is, if anything, more respectful of one's autonomy and individuality than the collection of cards that currently inhabit our wallets (issued, as they all are, by organizations other than ourselves). OpenID is an open source solution to the single-sign-on problem. Higgins is an open source trust framework for solutions like CardSpace and OpenID. None of these is a platform in the sense that it controls your digital selfhood.

Yet the perception is still there. Defaulted anonymity, for all its sometimes inconvenient costs (multiple sign-on, for example), is still preferable to any "system" that sacrifices it. To a lot of us, anyway.

So I'd like to take a different angle on this — one that will, hopefully, satisfy both my wife and Dr. Weinberger.

This approach begins with a different default: independence. As Neo put it in The Matrix, "The problem is choice". Are we equipped to be independent? Meaning, do we have choice? I don't think so. Not when big vendors still come at customers with battling silos and still call that market "free". Not when we still look to Google or Verizon to solve big online problems (e.g. broadband that isn't) for us.

The answers won't come from the outside. That may be where choices are presented, but it's not where choices are made.

Choice is an inside job. Including the choice to remain anonymous.