A few weeks ago Stiftung Warentest published “Mein Recht im Netz”. I am the author of the book.
Its subject is the management of our private digital identities. Or less philosophical: It’s about the safe and robust organisation of our private online accounts (for me they are more or less the same: digital identity = online account)
You wonder why this should be any problem worth writing a book about? You have less than 10 of these identities? Really?
Think of your e-mail accounts, you probably have more than one, those for online banking, maybe you have some online stock depot, don’t forget credit cards, surely there are accounts at Amazon or Zalando, maybe some identities for online games, for music streaming accounts, tv accounts, social media accounts, clubs, libraries, forums and so on.
Oh, and of course we should consider the internet-of-things-accounts too, your car, garage, refridgerator, heating, alarm system and the like.
Chances are 10:1 that you have at least 20 of these digital identies.
And some of them shall neither be corrupted by somebody nor shall its access be forgotten by you. So storing all the necessary access information safely away is not at all a trivial task. To the contrary.
Your passwords f.i. shall all be different, impossible to guess and changed at least once a year.
“Mein Recht im Netz” is on all that. On secure techniques (cryptology, password-safes), longlasting places for storage (cloud-services), legal requirements for moving safely in the digital world, methods and tools for the documentation and recommendations on and templates to specify one’s digital estate and bequest.
The subject itself is by no means a German one. In a digital world it is – well: worldwide, global. But the solutions still are rather “nation-focused”. First of all the legal conditions and requirements are quite different from country to country. And the cultural differences in this area are even larger.
So a mere translation of the book would not work. The questions are the same in Japan, France and Australia. The answers, the methods, tools and processes however have to be defined country by country.
To take a long and deep look into the book just follow the flag in the top. The German article there is quite detailed. Or have a look at it via amazon.de: