[IP] Re: Technology Leaders Favor Online ID Card Over Passwords - NYTimes.com

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: François Verbeek [f_verbeek@mac.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 9:33 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   Technology Leaders Favor Online ID Card Over Passwords - NYTimes.com

More likely the real reason for this is to make the correlation of
personal information a trivial task.
Too often for online marketers is one's accurate identification a
chore at best, a fuzzy guesswork at worse...
This would allow real individual targetting of ads, the holy grail of
online advertising without having all that mucking around these pesky
nicknames people keep using...

On another tone, by the way, such a system exists (openId) in a not-
too-intrusive way.... but it's keeping the consumer in the driver's
seat and I guess that's not exactly the purpose of this kind of
proposals...


F.

On 24 Jun 2008, at 14:08, David Farber wrote:

>
> ________________________________________
> From: Rich Kulawiec [rsk@gsp.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 8:39 AM
> To: David Farber
> Subject: Re: [IP] Technology Leaders Favor Online ID Card Over
> Passwords - NYTimes.com
>
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 12:01:38AM -0400, David Farber quoted:
>> SAN FRANCISCO ? Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are
>> among
>> the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the
>> problem
>> of password overload among computer users.
>
> But there's no such problem; with free software like Schneier's
> "Password Safe", it's very easy to keep track of many passwords.
>
>> The idea is to bring the concept of an identity card, like a driver?s
>> license, to the online world. Rather than logging on to sites with
>> user
>> IDs and passwords, people will gain access to sites using a secure
>> digital identity that is overseen by a third party.
>
> Which means that when (not if) the third party is successfully hacked,
> then the users' credentials will command a higher price on the open
> market because they'll facilitate access to more than one site.
>
> Oh, and would anyone like to make a side bet on how many days will
> elapse
> before the third party is served with a national security letter
> compelling
> full disclosure of every scrap of information in its possession and of
> course forbidding it from announcing this publicly?
>
> ---Rsk
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------




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