http://www.identityblog.com Digital Identity And Our Future Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:12:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Kim Komando has a great piece at USA Today where she explains geotagging through the experiences of two women who also happened to be using the foursquare location service.  This article is one of the first of what I expect will become a torrent as the media learns the implications of ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1155 Last week I gave a presentation at PII 2010 in Seattle where I tried to summarize what I had learned from my recent work on WiFi location services and identity.  During the question period  an audience member asked me to return to the slide where I recounted how I had first encountered Apple's ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1154 I had a tiny and unobtrusive little "privacy experience" today with Twitter that gives the lie to the idea that privacy makes things complicated and unruly. Someone had tried to locate me using my email address. My privacy settings did not allow this (not sure if it was because Twitter's privacy policy had changed ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1153 Stephan Engberg is member of the Strategic Advisory Board of the EU ICT Security & Dependability Taskforce and an innovator in terms of reconciling the security requirements in both ambient and integrated digital networks. I thought readers would benefit from comments he circulated in response to my posting on Touch2Id. Kim Cameron's comments ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1152 A few days ago I mentioned the outcry when Blizzard, publisher of the World of Warcraft (WoW) multi-player Internet game, decided to make gamers reveal their offline identities and identifiers within their fantasy gaming context.  I also descibed Blizzard's move as being the "kookiest" flaunting yet of the Fourth Law of Identity (Contextual separation through unidirectional identifiers).  Today the news is all about Blizzard's first ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1151 Reading Matias Woloski's blog I see that Southworks has put its work bridging OpenID and WS-Federation into an open source project (download here).    This is a great move.  He also shows some screen shots that give a good feel for what was involved in the Medtronics proof of concept described here.  Matias writes: A year ago I wrote a blog ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1150 Jacques Bus recently shared a communication he has circulated about the mobile technology issues I've been exploring.  To European readers he will need no introduction:  as Head of Unit for the European Commission's Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Research Programme he oversaw and gave consistency to the programs shaping Europe's ICT research investment.  Thoroughly expert ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1147 Mike Jones writes about an "identity mashup" that drives home a really important lesson:  the organizational and technical walls that used to stand in the way of Internet business are dissolving before our very eyes.  The change agent is the power of claims.  The mashup Mike describes crosses boundaries in many dimensions at once: between industries (medical, ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1146 The gaming world is seething after what is seen as an egregious assault on privacy by World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the most successful multiplayer role-playing games yet devised.  The issue?  Whereas players used to know each other through their WoW "handles", the company is now introducing a system called "RealID" that forces players to reveal ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1145 Ms. Smith at Network World made it to the home page of digg.com yesterday when she reported on my concerns about the collection and release of information related to people's movements and location.  I want to set the record straight about one thing: the headline.  It's not that I object to the term "attempted privacy ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1144 And now for something refreshingly different:  an innovative company that is doing identity right.  I'm talking about a British outfit called Touch2Id.  Their concept is really simple.  They offer young people a smart card that can be used to prove they are old enough to drink alcohol.  The technology is now well beyond the "proof of concept" phase ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1142 Todd Bishop at TechFlash published a comprehensive story this week on device fingerprints and location services:  Kim Cameron is an expert in digital identity and privacy, so when his iPhone recently prompted him to read and accept Apple's revised terms and conditions before downloading a new app, he was perhaps more inclined than the rest of ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1140 A few days ago I reported that from now on, to get into the iPhone App store you must allow Apple to share your phone or tablet device fingerprints and detailed, dynamic location information with anyone it pleases.  No chance to vet the purposes for which your location data is being used.  No way to know who it is going to.  As incredible ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1141 Niraj Chokshi has published a piece in The Atlantic where he grapples admirably with the issues related to Google's collection and use of device fingerprints (technically called MAC Addresses).  It is important and encouraging to have journalists like Niraj taking the time to explore these complex issues.   But I have to say that such an exploration is really hard right now.  Whether ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1139 Friday saw what I think is a historic post by Howard Schmidt on The Whitehouse Blog: "Today, I am pleased to announce the latest step in moving our Nation forward in securing our cyberspace with the release of the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).  This first draft of NSTIC was ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1138 A reader has pointed me to this article in The Consumerist ("Shoppers bite back") about Apple's new privacy policy:  Schmegga Apple updated its privacy policy today, with an important, and dare we say creepy new paragraph about location information. If you agree to the changes, (which you must do in order to download ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1137 I went to the Apple App store a few days ago to download a new iPhone application.  I expected that this would be as straightforward as it had been in the past: choose a title, click on pay, and presto - a new application becomes available. No such luck.  Apple had changed it's privacy policy, and I was taken ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1136 MSN reports on a fascinating use of tracking: Bees are being fitted with tiny radio ID tags to monitor their movements as part of research into whether pesticides could be giving the insects brain disorders, scientists have revealed The study is examining concerns that pesticides could be damaging bees' abilities to gather ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1135 Everyone involved with software and services should watch this remarkable investigative report by CBS News and think about what it teaches us. Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.  Because of this, the report shows, an office staple has ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1134 In The core of the matter at hand I gave the example of someone attending a conference while subscribed to a geo-location service.  I argued that the subscriber's cell phone would pick up all the MAC addresses (which serve as digital fingerprints) of nearby phones and laptops and send them in to the centralized database service, which ... http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1133