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Trusted internet identityTrusted internet identityPosted Jan 13, 2011 8:30 UTC (Thu) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665)Parent article: Trusted internet identity enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities. The first part of that is suspect; I've never known privacy to be enhanced by the centralisation of anything. The second is just downright annoying. There's already a perfectly good mechanism for reducing the need for end-users to memorise loads of usernames and passwords, and it's OpenID. But as others brighter than me have observed, commercial sites don't like it because it puts control squarely back in the hands of the users (denying the site owners the opportunity to make money from their users by collecting saleable data). As a result, uptake has been slow. Any government serious about the desire to reduce the multiplicity of logins available, and who was minded to throw its weight behind some scheme to achieve that, could mandate instead the use of a decentralised identity system (OpenID is one such, but there are others) alongside regular logins. But of course, just as these systems move control out of the hands of business owners, they move it out of the hands of government, too. The only people that have any interest in seeing take-up of such a system are us, the users, and who's asking them?
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