Curiouser and Curiouser! on identity

You are whose ID you steal

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 11:07:13 +0000

Here is a good joke. This Thanksgiving, be thankful that the government is cracking down on identity fraud. At least, that is what the Washington Post would have you believe. If you read into the details, you'll find that:

This article should have been an indictment of how the government has failed to protect the voters from identity fraud, and instead protects only the banks and government bureaucrats. In fact, the government is completely impotent to prevent similar and ongoing fraud -- the problems with identity security across the entire economic infrastructure are so systemic and deep that it will take work on many fronts to patch them all. The paper should just say, "Government surrenders in war on identity fraud. Three poor people jailed; 30,000 screwed. You're next and there's nothing you can do about it. Government war against people who copy lame Courtney Love music progressing nicely."

[Better Living Through Software]

» Time to start lobbying your MP/Senator/what-have-you.

Which reminds me, I owe my MP a list of sites where they can form their own opinion about the RIPA. Mine is a little too dependent upon Home Office rhetoric for my liking. Does anyone have any they would recommend?

A quandry over identity

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 09:59:22 +0000

Eric faces me?

Eric also says I'm being melodramatic about the Liberty Alliance view of individuals -- there, at least, he is wrong. It's the implementations by organizations that will treat us like slaves/consumers/baby-birds-to-be-stuffed-full-of-shit; the Liberty Alliance is simply facilitating organizational control of individual identity.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]

I've been skimming a lot of the recent and heavy traffic about digital identity and reputation. There's a lot of it, it tends to be involved and it's not my focus at the moment (as if anything was ).

However comments like this make me wish I could really bite into it. I wonder what is creeping along here, in the dark corners where nobody is really watching.

Is Mitch one of the few lone voices that we don't hear until it's too late?

Is there anyone out there who can blog a good, concise, summary of the issues and consequences?

The Home Office are at it again

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:46:10 +0000

Make your stand now

Paul Makepeace at Ecademy:

Take a stand on UK ID cards [Paul Makepeace]. Once again the UK govt is trying to foist a national ID system on the Brits. Stand.org.uk has prepared a piece to enable people to review the govt docs, and send an email to Those In Charge. There isn't a lot of time left. If you're going to do this, do it now. It's worth noting that this kind of protest killed off the RIP bill, so it works. It's very easy - read the page -- lively, short and entertainingly informative -- then click on the relevant checkboxes in Step 1, edit the form they present, and then off it goes. You must edit the box as it contains instructions that would look particularly stupid if sent. Here's what I hastily threw together, Dear Sir/Madam, I was dismayed recently to learn about the Government's proposals for Entitlement Cards (aka ID cards). [Ecademy: user blogs]

Is restriction of liberty hardwired into politicians?

[Dangerous thinking]

Here we go again.

Part of the problem is that MP's are, by and large, horribly ill-informed about IT issues. Couple this with a need to be seen to be doing something and you have a nasty situation where any loud voice is likely to receive widespread support.

My own MP gets most of her information from the Home Office. She's a Labour MP so I guess she feels she can trust them. This is bad. Of course my own guilty secret is that I was supposed to be sending them information about where they kind find other opinions about RIP. I could have thrown in some stuff about identity cards too. I still should.

In the meantime it's off to the Stand.

Bloggers identity

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 17:09:24 +0000

Bloggers identity Ever since I read about the SMBmeta proposal I started thinking about a similar approach to identify bloggers.

...

So it really looks like somebody is working with this stuff. The message also had a vCard of the sender attached, which I dragged to my Address Book and got me the full info about the person who sent the message updated on my computer (and my Palm, my phone, my iPod, etc.). At this point I would be tempted to link here my vCard, maybe even start to think about some new meta tag to add to these pages code but... it would also mean starting getting tons of spam almost immediately since all spiders out there would pick my email address up in seconds. While I agree on the fact that I am already getting a lot of spam and that getting my address out there is important, I'm trying to figure out a way to solve this riddle. Meanwhile, here's my vCard compressed as a .zip file, hoping that those spam spiders won't figure it out ";->" [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Isn't this what Kunekt is all about?

The Belgians seem to have got it wrong

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:27:03 +0100

The Identity Corner reports on problems with the Belgian e-ID scheme:

Belgium is the first European country to roll out identity chipcards with digital signature technology to all its citizens. The current Belgian ID chipcard, which was approved in July 2001 by the Belgian Council of Ministers and in February 2003 by the Belgian Parliament, is valid until 2007. The card provides strong security against traditional outsider attacks, but unfortunately has not been designed with privacy in mind. In fact, it features one of the worst privacy designs imaginable.

Read on for the full horror!

Poacher turned gamekeeper

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:37:07 +0100

Poacher turned gamekeeper Jack Dunning is writing about individuals keeping hold of their identity.

After 35 years of selling your name and personal information in the junk mail industry, I have come to the conclusion that you should have 100% control over this most valuable of possessions. For the last ten years my research has told me this is right, and now I am ready to do something about it. This BLOG is my way of paying back.

The PAOGA approach (disclaimer: I work for PAOGA) is exactly this. Allow individuals the right to choose what they information they reveal about themselves and to whom they reveal it.

In a PAOGA compliant application there is a mechanism which an application uses (via a webservices API) to request sensitive personal information. Accompanying the request must be a reason for the release. PAOGA then does the work of contacting the individual and getting their approval, or otherwise (assuming we don't have a previous decision on file).

What Jack is talking about in his Clarification of the basic issues:

You will have complete control over how your name and private information are used in the marketplace.
You will be assigned a unique ID which will completely replace the Social Security number for purposes of identification.
You will be able to opt-in, not have to opt-out, in receiving any junk mail offers.
You will be able to literally eliminate all identity theft.
The JACKPOT: You will share in the proceeds of the sale of your name and personal data.

we are calling Permission based marketing (although I wouldn't claim that we can eliminate all identity theft). We should have something about this available on our website soon.

I don't see a pattern here, do you?

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 23:21:56 +0100

A couple of months ago the LSE issued a report that rather comprehensively took apart the Home Office proposals on identity cards. Well here's a surprise, Charles Clarke's home office is ignoring most of it and especially all the bits which point out flaws in their arguments or where their proposals made no sense in the first place.

So, is everything figured out already?

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:36:51 +0100

A little late to the party but I'm now a member of the Identity Gang. So, am I too late? Is everything figured out already?

It doesn't take Freud

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 11:20:07 +0000

To work out that, yes, I am a complete egomaniac :-)

1984 is 21 years behinds schedule

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:37:57 +0000

It's typical of a government project to be vastly behind schedule and vastly over budget. So the governments current rampage through what used to be our civil liberties makes for a pretty typical government project.

As William Rees-Mogg writes in yesterdays Times:

The British are certainly less free than we were in 1997 or 2001.

The government is leading a charge against the very notion of privacy. It is using the fear of terrorism - a fear that it has conspired to manufacture - as a means of gaining public support for measures that a civilized society would reject outright.

Britain, if it ever was, is not such a society. Sure, I don't want to go live in Iran but don't tell me that we are on a path to Utopia!

And, worse yet, they're doing all this with money that they loot from our bank accounts through taxation.

The Government used to pretend they would cost £100 each; the London School of Economics estimates that the cost will be £500 a head, or £28 billion in all. I certainly don’t want to be compelled to spend £500 to give the Government a complete picture of my private existence.

I am not afraid of terrorism.

Sure, I don't want to be in a bus or tube train that gets blown up. But we have to ask ourselves, under what circumstances do organised groups of individuals take up arms against society in general?

The answer to our problems is not to screw the citizens further whilst conspiring with a bunch of asshats to rob and kill foreigners. If you look at the history of our actions abroad it seems clear to me that we face problems of our own making.

If you're in a hole. Stop digging!

And, to paraphrase Mike Rogers,

It’s not like the Saddam's troops were getting their rowboats out to invade the United Kingdom

If we hadn't conspired with Saddam for parochial advantage, and then with the first Bush administration to remove Saddam, and then with the Clinton administration to bomb Iraq further into the stone age, but had left him to his own devices it seems likely to me that, in time, his own people would have rejected him. Our best weapon in that cause was our liberal, open, societies and our rapidly improving standard of living.

Both of which this government seems intent on doing its level best to fuck up.

Calling all Identity wannabees

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 10:08:32 +0100

Is there anyone else in the UK that would have liked to go to the Internet Identity Workshop but can't?

What does advertising have to do with Identity?

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:55:58 +0100

I'm really starting to love Don Dodge's Next Big Thing blog. I've referred to 3 or 4 of his posts on our internal Teampage about Software as a Service (SaaS), investment, and now Google & Yahoo's problems with advertising.

Advertising, truly context sensitive advertising, is very closely related to identity. To give you an advert that really reflects your interests (you know that insanely rare kind of advert that you were actually glad you saw) requires considerable knowledge about you and your interests. The kind of knowledge that only you have. The kind of knowledge that you really don't want to give to marketers for fear of how they'll abuse it and you!

At PAOGA we are centred around the idea of giving every individual convenience with control for their online life. This flows from our 3 core values:

Trust - we have to earn this by always doing the right thing
Control - this is what we give you
Convenience - the reason why

Convenience is the goal, letting you make better use of your total identity and giving you the control you need to do this within your own, individual, comfort zone.

For some people that comfort zone might be "no advertising at all please" but for others they will be happy to see offers that really do relate to their life and how they live it. What they need is a safe way to share information about themselves such that their privacy and tolerances are not violated.