Brad Ideas - Portable identity as vaseline - Comments

Nice turn of phrase

Josh McHugh — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:46:03 -0700

Top-notch rhetoric-Fu:

While some portable data advocates think of the portability systems as “vaseline” that will grease the skids of smooth interoperation, the truth is it may assist another function of vaseline.

F, as they say, TW!

Still has user choice

brad — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:48:17 -0700

Your document still talks about user choice and configuration of what information is given out.

This reflects the common mistake here. You think of technologies like this as ways to control how your information is given out. They also need to be thought of as technologies that facilitate the giving out of information.

Unfortunately, you just can't facilitate the giving out of information without causing information to be given out more often.

The only way I can see to make it work is if you don't give out information. Instead you receive tasks to be done with your information, and do them for the outside application.

However, the problem is you can only do tasks that have been defined. Alternately, you can import generic code to do tasks, but you need a way to trust that code, since it could of course just suck in all your information and export it.

A proposed solution to identity issues/paradox

Trey Tomeny — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:52:35 -0700

I emailed you with an earlier version of this idea about a year ago. Check out http://thetrustednet.org to see if this iteration overcomes your previous objections. It involves organizations that are set up with the sole purpose of being identity service providers, dubbed here "Privacy Providers".

Portable identity as vaseline

brad — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:47:49 -0700

Earlier I wrote an essay on the paradox of identity management describing some counter-intuitive perils that arise from modern efforts at federated identity. Now it’s time to expand these ideas to efforts for portable personal data, especially portable social networks.

Partly as a reaction to Facebook’s popular applications platform, other social networking players are seeking a way to work together to stop Facebook from taking the entire pie. The Google-lead open social effort is the leading contender, but there are a variety of related technologies, including OpenID, hcard and other microformats. The primary goal is to make it easy, as users move from one system to another, or run sub-abblications on one platform, to make it easy to provide all sorts of data, including the map of their social network, to the other systems.

Some are also working on a better version of this goal, which is to allow platforms to interoperate. As I wrote a year ago interoperation seems the right long term goal, but a giant privacy challenge emerges. We may not get very many chances to get this right. We may only get one.

The paradox I identified goes against how most developers think. When it comes to greasing the skids of data flow, “features” such as portability, ease of use and user control, may not be entirely positive, and may in fact be on the whole negative. The easier it is for data to flow around, the more it will flow around, and the more that sites will ask, and then demand that it flow. There is a big difference between portability between applications — such as OpenOffice and MS Word reading and writing the same files — and portability between sites. Many are very worried about the risks of our handing so much personal data to single 3rd party sites like Facebook. And then Facebook made it super easy — in fact mandatory with the “install” of any application — to hand over all that data to hundreds of thousands of independent application developers. Now work is underway to make it super easy to hand over this data to every site that dares to ask or demand it.