A Historic Name-Trail Service

TL;DR

HINTS is a service that enables persistent online identification by linking historical identifiers with their valid timeframes, helping users reach individuals despite changes in their online identifiers.

Contribution

This paper introduces HINTS, a novel system that connects historical online identifiers with their validity periods to improve message delivery accuracy.

Findings

HINTS successfully resolves obsolete identifiers to current ones.

Participants can control their name trails and privacy settings.

The system reduces message delivery failures due to identifier changes.

Abstract

People change the identifiers through which they are reachable online as they change jobs or residences or Internet service providers. This kind of personal mobility makes reaching people online error-prone. As people move, they do not always know who or what has cached their now obsolete identifiers so as to inform them of the move. Use of these old identifiers can cause delivery failure of important messages, or worse, may cause delivery of messages to unintended recipients. For example, a sensitive email message sent to my now obsolete work address at a former place of employment may reach my unfriendly former boss instead of me. In this paper we describe HINTS, a historic name-trail service. This service provides a persistent way to name willing participants online using today's transient online identifiers. HINTS accomplishes this by connecting together the names a person uses along with the times during which those names were valid for the person, thus giving people control over the historic use of their names. A correspondent who wishes to reach a mobile person can use an obsolete online name for that person, qualified with a time at which the online name was successfully used; HINTS resolves this historic name to a current valid online identifier for the intended recipient, if that recipient has chosen to leave a name trail in HINTS.