My digital foundations #1
It’s almost impossible to live these days without a plethora of digital identities that enable us to do almost everything. Whether it be our television, gaming, social media, travel or family security, we depend on all of these things to make our lives work effectively.
Pretty quickly our homes have become as complex as almost any business of just a few years ago! Gone are the days when the most complex device in the home was the hi-fi system.
At the same time, the boundary between work and home has almost disappeared and a fragmented personal digital profile flows through to inefficiencies across our personal and professional lives.
While it might be tempting, few people have the luxury of starting their digital lives from scratch. We all have a technical legacy born of our past digital activities across technologies, family relationships and past jobs. No matter how disorganised, fragmented and out-of-control your digital life is, it is never too late to bring it back into order.
The cost of not taking stock leaves you open to security risks, complexity, fragmentation and the loss of opportunity to live the integrated promise of technology. Increasingly this means even more complexity in the relationship between our work lives and our personal technology.
Over future posts I will look at a number of aspects of our digital lives. In this instalment, I’ll tackle some of the foundations that should be put in place to bring our digital world to order.
The foundation email address
You sit at the centre of a number of circles: family, friends and work. There are a large number of systems and information that you share across all of these groups.
At the centre of your circles is an administrative email address. This email has the attribute of being the last resort for password recovery and other core account activities. It isn’t an address that you should share publically, you don’t want it compromised by excessive spam, for instance.
You could make this email address a product of your Internet Service Provider, but it is better to pick an independent and free service. The more independent of the services that you are going to use in the future, the better.
Search the internet for comparisons of the free email account services and you’ll get a range of articles comparing the benefits of each of the providers. Now is also a good time to pick a foundation name for your digital world. It isn’t necessary for this to be meaningful and it certainly shouldn’t be one that you expect your contacts to be using.
Social media identity
Next you need to have some sort of presence on the major social media sites. Privacy settings can be as tight as you want, but the purpose of these is to act as a common login credential. See Login with social media.
Social media is also the main place to manage groupings which we will talk about in future posts. These groupings come in three categories.
The first are your dependants who don’t control their own online presence, typically your children (or potentially elderly relatives). If they are under age you will create some sort of presence (but not a social media account).
The second group are those you are most closely associated with, such as your spouse or adult children. You will be inviting them to your networks but they will be in control of their own credentials.
Your third group are your very close relatives and friends with whom you regularly share content. Keep this to your immediate contacts but the techniques you use here are going to broaden out to be also your work groups that you enter and leave.
Password management
Finally, you need a password management tool. Today’s cloud services are poorly integrated and lack consistent identity management. This is a real opportunity for improvement on the Internet, hence the push towards using social media as a tool of integration. However, the goal should be that your architecture is independent of individual services and should last the distance.
There are a number of very good tools out there, just search for password management tools and compare the benefits of each. The important thing is to have a cloud-based solution that is easy to use across devices.
From here
Having a consistent email as a foundation for managing other accounts, social media for signing-in, a defined network of relationships and a tool for managing all of the accounts you work with will set the foundation for your digital life. When I next write on this topic, we’ll build on this foundation to start describing a complete architecture for our digital lives.