A couple of days ago I was in Alexandria having a whiteboard session on attribute exchange. I truly believe that people in a room will solve more problems than people on conference calls etc... I know that great ideas can be shared via blogs and e-mail but when it comes to hashing through the real issues I believe a piece of paper and face time are invaluable.
However that was not my original point when I started writing this. When i was in Alexandria I was leaving to get in my car and I spied this ....
I know it is a car and I know you will wonder what it has to do with identity .... but this car is a great analogy. When one first looks at it, if you know nothing about cars of the 20's and 30's you may think "cool car" but when you look at the front and you see a Bugatti symbol your mind may change. But does the initial view tell the true story? Is this a 1930's Bugatti? Well to truly know we need to be able to validate attributes of the car. The extent of what we validate is based on what our intent is. If we are the casual observer and it is just a "cool car" then the initial look is fine - we really do not care if it is a Bugatti. If you are a car nut then you may check the shape of the grill and the suspension to see if it matches the 30s Bugatti since you may want to be able to tell your friends "I saw this cool 30s Bugatti today". However if you are considering buying this car then you will really want to look at its attributes - engine and chassis numbers, papers of ownership and purchase, repair records etc.
Online transactions are no different. If I am commenting on yesterdays no-hitter on Yahoo! Sports then few people care if I know anything about baseball at all. When I buy my signed Halliday card on eBay then the buyer wants a higher level of assurance that he is going to get paid and will do a check of my credit card before shipping or will wait till the check clears. If I am going to proceed to online voting then the checks should be much more extensive.
We have always done all of these additional checks if a non-online transaction value is considered high - why would we not want to make sure that the same is done online. For those that think that those checks invade their rights I think the answer is simple - do commerce as you did it 10 years ago. For me I am hoping I can get to a point where I have one identity that I can use to provide selectable levels of trust so I can blog in the morning and buy Treasury bonds at night and not have to use 10 different identities to do it but will not have to expose any more data than I feel is needed.
And I will keep working to see that this idea is usable for all ....
.... cu
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