pii 2010

Privacy Identity and Innovation 2010 conference will take place in Seattle Washington, USA on 17-19 August 2010.

It's an all-hands-on-deck conference where industry executives, technologists, consumer advocates, policy experts and other stakeholders will come together as a group to examine critical issues like:  

• How emerging technologies & business models are impacting the way data is created, shared and aggregated
• Effective approaches for building online trust with users
• Ways in which user preferences and social norms are shifting
• Changes in the regulatory landscape, in the U.S. and internationally
• The role of anonymity and the future of reputation management on the Web
• The latest developments in user-centric identity management

Identity Context & Information

Kim Cameron does a stellar job in making the connection between identity, context and information in his blog post "Trends in what is known about us".

Information accumulates power by being put into proximity and aggregated.   This even appears to be an inherent property of information itself.  Of course information can’t effect its own aggregation, but easily finds hosts who are motivated to do so: businesses, governments, researchers, industries, libraries, data centers - and the indefatigable search engine.

What Kim is describing in the above quoted paragraph is connectedness; informational connectedness.   I would go a step further and add that information accumulates power by relational context.  Each individual views aggregated information differently depending on their personal perspective and the current context in which they are viewing the information.  If I am viewing aggregated information on a job candidate, the interpretation will be different than if my context is that of a friend.

The element that many don't seem to pay attention to, and Kim brings to the fore is that what happens within social networking tools won't always remain localized.   As digital personas connect, the information generated through those interactions multiplies and in the near future will become rather easily aggregated.Â

Get on the Identity Bus

The Identity Bus

I am all in favor of a standardized service in support of the seamless exchange of identity data. At present, public facing services need to support an alphabet soup of methods for 'sharing' identity data.

It is great for those of us interested in the technical nits and nats to converse about this, but in order to have full scale adoption of identity interoperability it needs to be seamless and mindless. Mindless in the sense the the end user of a system, web site, etc., does not have to think about which credential to use to gain access to a resource.

The thing I am having a lot of trouble understanding is why anyone would want to re-label this as LDAP. The use of LDAP has been so bastardized already, why add more confusion to. History: LDAP is a protocol for accessing data stored in a directory (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). The term has been used incorrectly for many years. If it is a directory, why can't we just call a directory a directory?

I'm thinking out loud here, but this identity 'bus' should be called something like the IBS - Identity Bus Service...

Microsoft Buys Credentica U-Prove

It was announced today that Microsoft has purchased Credntica's U-Prove technology.

Trust (and privacy) is a key aspect of connectedness. We share more with people we trust and less with those we don't. As Kim Cameron puts it, U-Prove works on a "need to know" basis. If a web site proves worthy we might share more details and the Info Card with U-Prove will make that easier to accomplish.

We will eventually see adoption of Info Cards as a mechanism. Adoption is slow but this bit of news will undoubtedly move things along.