I’ve always had my fair share of nightmares (literal, here…you know, wake up in a cold sweat kind of thing). They ranged from the truly terrifying upon waking (big big dangerous spiders), to the nearly farcical - trapped in a cage of excel? Yep, that happened several times and probably reflects some of the pain I experienced as an entry level investment banker.

Every time one of these things happen, I can fairly easily trace it to something in my life causing me anxiety. Obviously, sometimes there is an element of obscurity there (hi Freud!), but the relationships between fear and dream have always been pretty traceable. Which is why a dream I had last night is so eye opening.

The heart of the dream: traveling in South East Asia, and my wallet is stolen without my noticing. It is returned, also without my noticing, but, when I pull it out, I notice the money is fake. It dawns on me that my credit cards have been stolen, and, with it, my identity. Cue the cold sweat wake up.

And sitting and thinking about that dream now, it’s incredible to me that I haven’t already had that dream. I live, sleep, eat, dream the internet these days. Everything I do is contained in a series of linked techno-social constructs that are me because…I have the passwords to them? I have several bits of unique information that let me access them and use them? But those elements are disjointed enough, and there are enough people out there who have no meaningful experience with flesh and blood Aaron Harris, that those identities could just as easily not be me. With the regular compromise of various security systems all over the world - from blogging platforms to major retail outlets - the digital bits that we point to as “us” are increasingly at risk of becoming…not us? Or, perhaps, some small piece of that identity could be hijacked without our even realizing it.

Which is to take a long winded run-up to a fairly old existential crisis. This time, though, that crisis is effectively projected outwards. It’s no longer simply a question of losing/finding oneself within one’s own mind. There’s an increasingly large element of not knowing where the basic anchors of one’s identity are, or if they are even secure. And I think that points to one of those startup ideas/themes that always plays around in my head (especially as I spend hours looking over the tutors signing up for tutorspree and running screens and talking to them): we need a better solution to personal identity, and it has to be secure. Does that mean everyone gets their own RSA key? Biometric scanning at every computer? Star Trek style voice/code word combinations to set off the self destruct?

I’m really not sure. But until that does happen, I’ll still probably wake up in a cold sweat every now and then, wondering if I’m still me.

I signed up for one of the upcoming AVC.com meetups today, and noticed that my picture on meetup is different than the one I use on: twitter, facebook, disqus (through gravatar), wordpress, and tumblr. More than that, each of those sites has a different set of credentials (not to mention various email and ecommerce accounts). If I ever want to change that identity at the same time, I have to go to each one and change it in each place.

I realize that Facebook wants to take care of that for me, as do several other initiatives, but I have yet to encounter one that has the penetration, ease of use, and degree of trustworthiness that I want to manage my identity in toto (and I really don’t trust facebook to manage this kind of thing for me).

I have been knocking and idea around in my head that is, essentially, a privacy/password keeper. The service has secure access to all of your different accounts, and pulls all of your login and identity information into one place for you to view it. You want to change your passwords? Great, you tell the application, and it changes all of your passwords for you at one swoop. Want to change your profile pictures, address, contact info? Great, it can do that too. Better yet, you can pay for an upgrade to have all of your passwords run off of an RSA key. I’m pretty sure hackers are not targeting me personally, so this way, if they do happen to find my password on a given day, it will most likely have changed by the time they try to use it.

The concept wouldn’t alter my ability to interact with linkedin or facebook the way I do now: I could still edit those discreet sites to my hearts content, but the information that they share with other services could be centrally managed, giving me a way to actually control who I am on a broad basis, and to give me access to my information without having to memorize eight different passwords and ten different passkey questions.

I had breakfast yesterday with Robin Tyrangiel, who is making the very bold move of moving to beijing first, learning chinese second, and figuring out how to start a business and make money third.

In any case, our conversation turned to facebook and trust issues, as most conversations about technology inevitably do these days. What I thought crystallized in this conversation, though, was the explicit link between the ethos of a company and the ethos of its founder. At the end of the day, there seems to be very little reason to trust mark zuckerberg. While it seems clear that he stole a significant amount from connectU, so did Jobs and Gates from xerox. The bigger issue is the cavalier attitude towards data displayed in a number of released conversations from the very early days, and the observable trend on privacy in facebook since that time. The way in which the privacy changes were made say more about the inherent trustworthiness of the company than the changes themselves.

In any case, when it comes to a company like Google, I have no doubt that they are going to do everything that they can to make a ton of money off of me. However, for the most part, I trust them to do that in an above board way, because I think that Larry and Sergey have a vested, personal interest in privacy (which is complete conjecture). As importantly, Google is run by an adult who examines major company moves from a number of angles before imposing them on their user base, and is willing to make real changes due to complaints. Would facebook have admitted it was collecting info it should not have the way google did? Somehow, I doubt it.