{"id":514,"date":"2006-08-06T17:09:18","date_gmt":"2006-08-07T01:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=514"},"modified":"2006-08-06T17:13:13","modified_gmt":"2006-08-07T01:13:13","slug":"yeah-im-a-27-year-old-single-guy-but-should-i-tell-my-wife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=514","title":{"rendered":"Yeah, I&#39;m a 27 year old single guy, but should I tell my wife?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Intel&#39;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/25408159\" class=\"broken_link\">Conor Cahill<\/a> points out <a href=\"http:\/\/conorcahill.blogspot.com\/2006\/08\/yeah-im-27-year-old-single-guy-but.html\">the problems<\/a> with the &#8220;verification chains&#8221; being&nbsp;used by&nbsp;some of the emerging commercial identity verification services:&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In &#8220;<a href=\"\/?p=512\"><font color=\"#3366aa\">How old are you, are you single?<\/font><\/a>, my friend, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/\"><font color=\"#776644\">Kim Cameron<\/font><\/a>, quotes an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.post-gazette.com\/pg\/06215\/710847-96.stm\" class=\"broken_link\"><font color=\"#776644\">article<\/font><\/a> in the post-gazette.com Business News talking about identity verification services. The article, describes the process as:<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Verification Chain<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>How new identity-verification services work.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Users sign up for a new account on a classified, social-networking or dating site and are prompted to click through to the site of an identity verifier.<\/li>\n<li>Verification service prompts users to create profiles with details such as their age, address, and occupation.<\/li>\n<li>Verification services &#8212; or a separate company &#8212; electronically check data in public-record databases to verify assertions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At first glance, this verification service looks like a good step forward. However, if you look closely, the process appears to mimic the same procedures that provide the foundation for much of the identity theft that exists to date &#8212; that being the fact that all I need to do to steal <strong>your<\/strong> identity is know a few key pieces of information (which will verify correctly).<\/p>\n<p>I would hope that they start to add stronger verification that the person who &#8220;knows&#8221; this stuff is actually the person who&#39;s data is being verified. Things like what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paypal.com\/\"><font color=\"#3366aa\">Paypal<\/font><\/a> does for bank account verification (deposit two small sums in your account and require you to input the actual deposit values to prove you have access to the account).<\/p>\n<p>We really need to move away from knowledge of basic facts as a verification of identity, especially when many of those facts are published in one form or another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Paypal&#39;s approach is one of the best ways&nbsp;to prove&nbsp;that you have control of a particular bank account.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But it doesn&#39;t say much about how old you are &#8211; or whether you are single.&nbsp; So it&#39;s not a silver bullet in the wider scheme of things.<\/p>\n<p>Too bad, because I couldn&#39;t agree more that knowing things about me doesn&#39;t prove you are me.<\/p>\n<p>Isn&#39;t it amazing&nbsp;how many times we are required to tell people far too much about ourselves?&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I&#39;ve been asked so many times for the name of my first pet that I&#39;ve had to make one up.&nbsp; My first pet was a turtle, and as far as I can remember, his short life didn&#39;t involve a name &#8211; we were both too young.&nbsp; Yet I have to use this silly name to avoid giving people my mother&#39;s date of birth.<\/p>\n<p>Once you&#39;ve revealed all, the party you&#39;ve given it to can reveal all too.&nbsp; If there&#39;s a one in one thousand chance that someone will sell or misuse that information,&nbsp;when you have given it to one thousand people the probability of&nbsp;misuse has reached one.<\/p>\n<p>Right now we give all our identifying information to every Tom, Dick and Harry, each of whom&nbsp;remember who we are by storing it &#8211; probably unsafely.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>What if we just gave it to Tom, or a couple of Toms, and the Toms&nbsp;then vouched for who we are?&nbsp; We would &#8220;register&#8221; with the Toms, and the Toms would make claims about us.&nbsp; Then the chances of having our identity stolen would drop, in the example above, from certainty, to one or two in&nbsp;a thousand.&nbsp; Not perfect, but hey, I&#39;ll take it.<\/p>\n<p>If&nbsp;Tom&nbsp;stands behind our identity for a number of years, he can become progressively more certain&nbsp;about our behavior, if not our childhood.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#39;m hoping that in the description given above of how a verification service operates, once&nbsp;you have registered with a&nbsp;service, it&nbsp;stands behind assertions about you, so you <em>no longer need to release&nbsp;identifying information<\/em>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Isn&#39;t it amazing how many times we are required to tell people far too much about ourselves?  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}