Category: Identity

Business, Model, Scenario and Technology

Reading more of the discussion about Identity Oracles, I've come to agree with the importance of having separate names for the business model and the underlying technology that would be used to deliver services.  So I buy Dave Kearns's advice: 

Drop it while you can, Kim. Bob's right on this one. The “Identity Oracle” is a business model, not a technology feature.

Why was I conflating things?

Well, when we were devising the technology for claims transformers, we were specifically trying to enable the scenario of providing answers to questions without releasing the information on which the answers are based (in other words, support derived claims).  We intended the claims transformer to be the technology component that could supply such answers. 

I saw the name “Identity Oracle” as describing the scenario.

Now I see the advantages of having very precise naming for a number of interrelated things.  It can leave us with this taxonomy: 

Reading Dave Kearn's post on how a service like HealthVault might evolve in the direction of an Identity Oracle, I couldn't help wondering about the problems of liability implied by some of these behaviors.

For example, consider a health-related Identity Oracle that could answer the question, “Can Kim take drug X without fear of drug interactions?”.  The resultant “yes” or “no” would be a lot more privacy friendly than releasing all of Kim's drug prescriptions and the medical information necessary to adequately answer the question. 

However, the Identity Oracle presumably assumes more liability by “selling” its “yes” or “no” conclusion than it would by releasing simple facts (assuming the right permissions and use restrictions were in place). 

In other words, success of this model will involve a transfer of liability from the party currently making a decision to the oracle.  This liability has to be factored into the cost structure of the identity oracle business model, and the resultant pricing must make sense to the requesting party.

Burton Group goes to Mainstreet

In this cogent article, the New York Times’ Denise Caruso distinguishes herself with a compelling treatment of complex identity and privacy issues.  For instance, her characterization of Mint.com is enough to turn the Flying Nun into a paranoid: 

“In exchange for customers uploading their account information and allowing sponsors to offer them specialized services, Mint will connect nightly to their credit-card providers, banks and credit unions. Then it automatically updates transactions and accounts, balances their checkbooks, categorizes their transactions, compares cash with debt and, based on their personal spending habits, shops for better rates on new accounts and credit cards.”

I sure would like to know more about how mint.com protects itself, who oversees it, how it protects me, and most important, what it does and doesn't and will never do with the massively detailed personal information it collects.  Today, not even my accountant or my wife scrutinizes my credit card spending.

To the rescue

Just as the reader is losing all hope, in rides – are you ready? – Mike Neuenschwander from the Burton Group.   He puts forward the ideas all of us in the community are working on, but with a twist that is very novel – and perhaps even “American”:

“We’re in a situation where business holds all the cards…  â€œBusinesses put the deal in front of the consumer, they control the playing field and the consumer doesn’t have any say in how the deal plays out.”

ONE way to change this, he said, is to make people more like organizations.

To this end, Mr. Neuenschwander and his colleagues have floated the intriguing concept of the L.L.P.: the Limited Liability Persona. This persona would be a legally recognized virtual person in which users could “invest” the financial or identity resources of their choosing.

Once their individual personas are created, consumers would be able to use them as their legal “alter ego,” even in financial transactions. “My L.L.P. would have its own mailing address, its own tax ID number, and that’s the information I’d give when I’m online,” Mr. Neuenschwander said. Other benefits include the ability for “personas” to limit their financial exposure in ways that individuals cannot. Continue reading Burton Group goes to Mainstreet

Success brings complexities too

Pamela Dingle is the awesome, programming, geek, girl Canadian who runs The Pamela Project.   She produced the WordPress InfoCard plugin that I use on my blog.  In this piece, she has a different take on Information Card adoption:

“It has been a while since I’ve meandered through my thoughts on where the world of the Identity Metasystem is going these days.

“A few entries in the blogosphere have examined what this system is not – which is in common use. I can’t deny the truth of such statements. However, what I do see, is a growing number of people who are contacting me, because they are working hard to change this fact.

“I can honestly say that I don’t worry about whether Information Cards will succeed. What I worry about, is what happens when it does. To me, this is why it is critical to run interops via OSIS, and not only that, but to create a body of work that anyone can use to understand, test, and create correctly operating components. We are in the lull before the storm.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘victims of our own success’? This is what we will be, if the wave of mass adoption comes, and we haven’t made it easy to be a GOOD member of the Identity Metasystem. If we don’t set community consensus on edge cases, abuse cases, some common standards for basic user interface, and other such things now, if we all don’t get busy implementing and learning from our mistakes and fixing them while it is still easy to do so, it is going to be chaos when suddenly the big thing is for every site out there to accept Information Cards.

“My view is, that user-centric technology in general is a massive tsunami moving towards the coast. It doesn’t look like much now because the wavelength is long — but once we get close to shore… If I’m right, there will be a sudden, immediate, and critical demand for architects, sys-admins, and developers with experience in this space. The more mistakes we make now and learn from, the less mistakes these future techies will have to make en masse.

“… and if I’m wrong about the tsunami — well I guess we’ll all have stories to tell around the campfire…. :)“

Continue reading Success brings complexities too

EPIC opposes Google / Doubleclick merger

Last week the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) made an agenda-setting intervention on the newest dangers in digital privacy.  EPIC is perhaps the world’s most influential privacy advocacy group,  and presented its brief to a US Senate hearing looking into Google’s proposed acquisition of Doubleclick. 

According to USA Today,

“The Federal Trade Commission is already reviewing whether the Google-DoubleClick combination would violate antitrust law.  Consumer groups are pressing the agency to also scrutinize Google's privacy practices.  Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Senate committee that Google should be required to strengthen its privacy practices as a condition of the acquisition.”

Continue reading EPIC opposes Google / Doubleclick merger

What if we fail?

As innovators we need to think about what happens if our systems fail.  I've argued, for example, that the starting point for designing a secure system is to recognize it will be breached.

So I took Ben Laurie's recent piece on CardSpace as an invitation to review one more time what can go wrong with Information Cards and CardSpace. 

For those who don't know him, Ben has been a leading innovator in terms of open source SSL, and currently works at Google.  In his piece he writes that OpenID isn't gaining much traction.  Then he turns to CardSpace, which he says “appears to be supported only by Microsoft products.”

A number of people gagged on this, including Dale Olds of Novell (who none the less retained his unflappable charm).  Dale had just released his new DigitalMe product providing Information Card support for Mac and Linux.  In fact, at Digital ID World, the open source Bandit Project had launched a “Control Your Identity” campaign to promote awareness and use of information card technology. Hmmm.  I wonder if Linux is a Microsoft product? 
Continue reading What if we fail?

MSN and Windows Live hook up InfoCard Beta

Video of Hotmail Beta of Information Cards

In this video of the Windows Live ID beta (1:20) we use Bandit's DigitalMe to register and log into Hotmail from a Mac.  If anyone has been concerned that Information Cards won't scale to handle large sites, they can relax now.  To see another version of the demo, this time using CardSpace, watch this (2:20). 

MSN and Windows Live CardSpace Beta

You can now use Information Cards at Hotmail and all the other MSN/Windows Live sites. 

Just go here to associate an Information Card with your existing account.   I found that both Windows CardSpace and the Mac DigitalMe information card selectors worked beautifully with the system.  Check out this video to see what it was like registering and logging in from my Mac using DigitalMe. 

It's worth taking a step back to think about what can go wrong when you add a feature of this importance to a site with 300 million accounts.  If things don't work, you don't have a software bug – you have a trainwreck.  So the Windows Live people have done a lot of thinking, planning and testing in order both to create a cool experience and keep from confusing their users.   

There are still some anomolies.  In the words of the Beta announcement: Continue reading MSN and Windows Live CardSpace Beta

Managed information cards for secure online purchasing

Here's news of an important technology demonstration from Ping Identity and ACI Worldwide at the upcoming DIDW Conference (just two weeks away in San Francisco in case you have forgotten to register).

To put this in context, ACI Worldwide is the world leader in retail payments – over half the plastic card transactions in the world (55 billion last year) go through ACI's software at banks, merchants and networks in over 85 countries. Continue reading Managed information cards for secure online purchasing

We need a spectrum

Stefan Brands runs off in the wrong direction in his recent treatise on OpenID.  Who really needs a “shock and awe” attempt to bonk the new OpenID “cryptographic primitives” back into the stone age?

It's not that you shouldn't read the piece; even though subtlety is not its strong suit, it brings together a lot of information about a threat model for OpenID.

The main problem is simply that it misses the whole point about why OpenID is of interest.
Continue reading We need a spectrum