Regulatory Framework for Trusted Identity
Theme: Digital Infrastructure
Idea Status: +7 | Total Votes: 13 | Comments: 3
What is now emerging as a limiting factor within the digital infrastructure is the issue of trust. Trust has become a major issue for high–value, high impact transactions for exchanging and storing information. The trust issue has now become critical when these transactions reguire the legal identity of individuals. How do you trust the identity of an individual that is asserted online? Equally so, how does the person having this identity trust you? Facebook is demonstrating the rapid adoption of online/digital identity, but there is no way to hold these organizations to account for how these identities are verifed or used.
Trust is an implicit but essential component to the digital economy. Facebook demonstrates taht in today's open and socially networked environment, trust can no longer remain implicit and be left to 'unregulated' market forces. Idenity can be viewed as a personal asset, but there singnificant public interest on protecting this identity on behalf of the individual. Further, there are many threats to identity (organized crime) and the burden for users to 'prove' themselves repeatedly by disclosing personal information over and over is now becoming untenable. Many innovative and technologically advanced solutions exist for identity, but these will remain fragmented unless a legally enforceable regulatory framwork exists that allows these identities to be trusted between organizations and across jurisdictions.
A regulatory framework does not imply a centralized service (or database) but rather a smoothly functioning exchange and use of identities in a manner that protects the rights of citizens and promotes the use of the digitial infrastructure.
To conclude, to encourage the use and adoption of the digital infrastructure, especially for those organizations and institutions that serve the public interest, requires the issue of trusted identity to be resolved.
Comments
colan — 2010–06–22 23:52:18 EDT wrote
We should be looking at free and open technologies such as OpenID, which is already being investigated by the U.S. government:
"The US Government has reached out to the OpenID Foundation for collaboration in support of the Government Services Administration's pilot adoption of OpenID technology."
colan — 2010–06–23 00:00:12 EDT wrote
Sorry, didn't realize I needed HTML tags. Here are those URLs again:
R — 2010–06–26 22:00:59 EDT wrote
Other past project that may inspire further research in this area:
Open Privacy
