Last week, the Credentials Community Group of the World Wide Web Consortium hosted Scott Jones, sharing his company’s work on Client-side Biometric Authentication and Identity Verification. https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/6c106024-7f5f-4297-972b-18af6432aaef/20260203T120000/ He said a lot of smart things about his company, Realeyes https://realeyes.ai/, and … Continue reading →
Last week, the Credentials Community Group of the World Wide Web Consortium hosted Scott Jones, sharing his company’s work on Client-side Biometric Authentication and Identity Verification. https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/6c106024-7f5f-4297-972b-18af6432aaef/20260203T120000/ <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="382" height="132" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/verifeye.png" alt="VerifEye Powered by Realeyes" class="wp-image-1486" style="aspect-ratio:2.8941636083816737;width:301px;height:auto" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/verifeye.png 382w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/verifeye-300x104.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 382px) 100vw, 382px" /> He said a lot of smart things about his company, Realeyes https://realeyes.ai/, and their VerifEye offering. They are a leader in using AI and advanced biometrics for identity verification. I appreciated his discussion of how they are using real technology to improve the quality and privacy of identity assurance. In particular, I appreciate the progress towards client-side biometric authentication, which may prove a long term best-of-class approach to securing our digital identities without creating a panopticon. However, there is a fundamental flaw in their approach that deserves attention. Surprisingly, it is one that Dr Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle might have found familiar. At the end of the day, after all the privacy-engineering on the front end, Realeyes maintains their own uniqueness database. To their credit, they are refreshingly candid about charging for access. They hope to create a global database of who is human and then charge to query that database. It’s a straightforward business model that helps us better understand how such a system might be abused or otherwise cause harm. This vendor-controlled uniqueness database is the problem. Worldcoin and World <img decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Worldcoin_logo-150x150.jpg" alt="World Logo" class="wp-image-1487" style="width:104px;height:auto" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Worldcoin_logo-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Worldcoin_logo-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Worldcoin_logo.jpg 480w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> Realeyes is essentially following the footsteps of World https://world.org, formerly Wordcoin, the brainchild of Sam Altman as he seeks to establish “Universal proof of human, finance and connection for every human.” World is clear in the goal: “secure access to things only humans… should have access to.” The point is to create a list of who is (and implicitly who isn’t) human, specifically for the purposes of refusing services to those deemed less than human. World, of course, couches this in the context of Altman’s fear mongering about AI, but the language is surprisingly straightforward. If you aren’t deemed human by World, you will be denied services. Both Realeyes and World establish a global uniqueness database draped in the language of privacy. Both have legitimate technical innovations that improve the quality of recognition. Both have privacy innovations that reduce the unnecessary exposure of PII. Unfortunately, both are fundamentally vendor-lockin businesses that, in the pursuit of profit, seek to dehumanize at scale. Both are playing from the same playbook, overpromising privacy benefits through buzzword bingo to justify building out a global database of humanity. <img decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/privacy-funhouse-1024x559.png" alt="Not so private funhouse that lets an observer see everything." class="wp-image-1475" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/privacy-funhouse-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/privacy-funhouse-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/privacy-funhouse-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/privacy-funhouse-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/privacy-funhouse-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> At the end of the day, they each control the set of humans in their uniqueness database. Only they can audit that database. Only they can correct errors in that database. And only they control the use of that dataset in other contexts, e.g., only allowing those who have signed up for their program to access certain services. Neither are open systems; both are clearly and unambiguously a mechanism for building a proprietary database they charge per transaction to query. Global Uniqueness is the Problem, not the Goal The notion of global uniqueness makes sense naively, but when considered more thoroughly, it’s a mirage that leads good people to build bad systems. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/global-uniqueness-1024x559.png" alt="A human / robot handshake, with the human's hand stamped with a globe and the word "Unique"." class="wp-image-1482" style="aspect-ratio:1.8318878967830137" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/global-uniqueness-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/global-uniqueness-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/global-uniqueness-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/global-uniqueness-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/global-uniqueness-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> I have had multiple conversations with World and discussions with hundreds, perhaps thousands of people at the many identity conferences I’ve attended over the last decade, including the Internet Identity Workshop and the European Identity and Cloud Conference. I’m also a author, participant, and leader in the Rebooting the Web of Trust writing workshop and I’m the use case editor at the World Wide Web Consortium for both Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). In short, I’ve been exploring, curating, and documenting decentralized identity use cases for over a decade, and I have yet to find one that justifies a single universal database to uniquely identify every human on the planet for all time. World argues that Universal Basic Income is that use case. A single database that can keep track of everyone, to monitor who received their share payment in this cycle. Seems legit at first glance. But no UBI has ever been truly global, nor is a single payment-per-person-ever the payment strategy for “income”. What actually happens is that a select group of beneficiaries, chosen by funders, receive regular payments for a limited time. That’s a stark contrast to the aspirations of Realeyes and World, which identifies everyone on the planet uniquely across all time. The scope of uniqueness for UBI, even as imagined, is, in practice, limited in geography, humanity, and time. No solution will reach everywhere on the planet. Some jurisdictions will not tolerate this technology. No solution will include all people. There will be people who refuse to or can’t participate. People whose religious beliefs or physical disability preclude participating. No solution can track humans for all time. What is needed is tracking against a timeframe and cohort, e.g., membership or geography. To make matters worse, automated solutions simply can’t handle death or other life events without additional public infrastructure based on either trusted authorities asserting marriage, births, and deaths or a mass surveillance system that observes these events for automated assessment and programmatic attestation. One of the biggest problems in vital records is the erroneous perception by the bureaucracy of supposedly living constituents that are, in fact, dead. See UCL’s Ignoble Prize-winning research on blue zones. A global uniqueness database can’t, as a database, stay up-to-date without monitoring the real-world, and we really don’t want a global surveillance system just to maintain a database of who is human or not. I also don’t want a database where any particular nation-state or corporation can declare me non-human. I live where I live; why track me globally? I don’t want to be in some database that is accessible in any way to [insert name of your favorite geopolitical enemy]. What I want is to be able to voluntarily choose which digital systems I participate in, run by organizations I trust. What is needed for UBI, insurance claims, digital voting, or any other actual legitimate use of unique personhood is the assurance that, for a limited period of time, within a given population, that a specific individual receives a restricted benefit no more than once. That isn’t helped by a global database of who is or isn’t human. It’s a bizarre non-sequitur to claim that it is. For example, in UBI experiments in California payments were made to specific individuals over a limited period of time, e.g., $500/month for 24 months. No global database would determine who is or isn’t in that set of limited individuals. No global database would keep track of whom has been paid by that UBI program. Any solution that keeps those details in production longer than the limited time period of the UBI allowance is retaining personal information beyond its intended use. Rather than a system that is checked once to establish a permanent identifier for everyone for all time, functioning UBI systems need to track authorized distributions, for a limited time, to a limited population. A global uniqueness database doesn’t help do that; it increases complexity and introduces an outside party whose interests may or may not be aligned, without actually achieving its claimed goals. It’s the Locality That Matters It’s been suggested that “just about any solution is going to involve a database that is under the control of some party”. This also makes intuitive sense, as databases are where we keep track of data at scale. But what we don’t need is a global database of who qualifies as human. In fact what we need are local databases to keep track of the events and people that matter to them. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/you-are-here-1024x559.png" alt="A person looking at a sign with a map with an arrow and the words "You are here"" class="wp-image-1478" style="aspect-ratio:1.8318878967830137" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/you-are-here-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/you-are-here-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/you-are-here-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/you-are-here-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/you-are-here-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> These contextual databases are both necessary and can be constrained to ensure the appropriate privacy boundaries are respected. A database that any individual or organization asserts as definitive for everyone on the planet, is literally an attempt to centralize identification and control of our very humanity. In contrast, any decision-making entity (including humans and organizations) will have good reasons to maintain a database of the individuals it is in the job of keeping track of. For example, the American Medical Association (AMA) maintains a database of its members. But what the AMA doesn’t do is attempt to collect all of humanity into a single computational context. It does not attempt to create a global system where they alone get to decide who is human. They are creating a local system that does what they deem appropriate for their members’ needs. Context collapse is at the heart of many, if not most, privacy harms created by centralized information systems. Global uniqueness, as envisioned by Realeyes and World, forces a global context collapse for all humanity for all time. The fact is, we have NEVER had a singular information system that addresses all of humanity. Period. And we don’t want one. We really don’t. Reality itself can’t even maintain a real-time global information context thanks to the speed of light. Even time can’t be treated as a universal. It flows faster and slower based on altitude and speed. It’s crazy. Race conditions for settling global ordering means that even the best distributed system invented (bitcoin) only has probabilistic, historic commitments to truth. Even bitcoin can’t agree on which block is “at the tip” because that’s just not how it works. We have only ever worked in isolated compute contexts dealing with individual perspectives and domains. Initially that was human cognition, then we built out institutional cognition with bureaucracy. Each bureaucracy is, necessarily, a construct and result of its own information architecture. Any bureaucracy that is attempting to intercede for all humans in all contexts is a misguided attempt to establish a control structure where that bureaucracy’s rules, beliefs, and values are imposed on everyone, typically placing that bureaucracy in a position to extract rents without delivering commensurate value. There are good reasons for different people to have different beliefs and values and I find it unethical to impose the beliefs and values of any subset on everyone else. So… I don’t support any global set of supposed “truth” that is under the control of any single entity. And what is a more essential truth than whether or not someone is human? Keep Humanity Human I’m all for client-side biometrics as both World and Realeyes offer. What I’m not for is centralized lists of who is, and who is not, human. Any “uniqueness” database that isn’t specific to a jurisdiction, a community, or an initiative is an attempt to do just that: create a definitive list of who qualifies as human. Such a list of “unique” humans, used to restrict services to non-humans, will inevitably and erroneously restrict services to actual humans not on the list. In many cases, that means a loss of liberty, dignity, and basic human essentials. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/campfire-1024x559.png" alt="Welcoming friends, inviting a new person to join the conversation." class="wp-image-1479" style="aspect-ratio:1.8333760903027194" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/campfire-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/campfire-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/campfire-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/campfire-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/campfire-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> If you want to keep track of who is or isn’t (a) subject to a jurisdiction, (b) a member of a community, or (c) a legitimate participant in a particular project, that’s a legitimate list of people of interest. Different processes maintain different lists for different organizations. That’s how society organizes itself. Done well, you get a decentralized tapestry of different jurisdictions, communities, and projects, that can all keep track of their participants without interference from centralized parties. This is literally how the global world order is maintained, today. By different entities taking care of their own business in their own way. But what Worldcoin and Realeyes are banking their business model on is creating the ONE uniqueness database for everything, which they conveniently charge a fee to query. And if they succeed–when these uniqueness databases become the gatekeeper to public and private services–then those who can’t or won’t participate in their system will be treated as less than human, unable to participate as full members of our increasingly digitized society. In contrast, what we are building at the Digital Fiduciary Initiative https://digitalfiduciary.org puts a human in the loop for identity verification, in a privacy-preserving yet auditable way that can be contextualized to the highest granularity. Any individual, organization, or cross-organizational initiative is free to manage their own list of participants with robust identity assurance and rigorous authentication, verification, and validation as those participants engage digitally. Humans determine who is human, not algorithms and definitely not databases listing all acceptable humans. Eugenics, Exclusion, and Dehumanization While many who advocate for global uniqueness databases are likely unaware of the ideological foundations of the approach, it is fundamentally an exclusionary and racist solution in the long tradition of eugenics. Those who advocate for eugenics argue that humanity deserves to be intentionally improved by accelerating births of those deemed fit and restricting the role of the “unfit” in society. If you don’t meet the criteria of goodness, you are less than human and your genes should be removed from the species. These criteria typically exclude the poor, disabled, and minorities using pseudo-science to justify who qualifies as worthy of human consideration, and who are treated as animals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man The problem with proof of humanity, as imagined by Realeyes and World, is that my humanity is not subject to the judgment of any single entity. No nation-state. No corporation. No human. No one has the right, nor the authority to declare that I, Joe Andrieu, am not human. A system designed to separate humans from non-humans purely from placement on a list is a tool perfectly designed for enforcing nationalist, racist exclusion that treats those outside of the ruling class as less than human. And declaring certain classes of people as less than human is the hallmark of racist and eugenic movements. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rejects-1024x559.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-1493" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rejects-1024x559.jpeg 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rejects-300x164.jpeg 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rejects-768x419.jpeg 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rejects-1536x838.jpeg 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rejects.jpeg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> On the other hand, every organization has a right to decide–on their own judgment–how they want to treat me. That is what we do have the right to do: decide how we are going to treat others. We might treat people differently based on where they are from, how old they are, or what positions they may be selected for, but treating people differently because some vendor decides they don’t pass muster as a human is setting up society to defer our most fundamental judgment to an unaccountable intermediary. Should a nation-state decide that they refuse to treat me in a particular way, that’s within their domain. What they shouldn’t do is rely on the unaccountable, unauditable, uncorrectable proprietary systems like those offered by Realeyes and World. The Fundamental Unknowability of Particular Humanity Compounding the moral hazards of a global database is the fundamental unknowability of the human person on the other side of a digitally intermediated interaction. While we can build these systems, populate these databases, and restrict access to services based on who appears to be in some database or not, we cannot know for certain if the party we think we are interacting with has given their authentication means to someone else: such as when we hand someone our phone after activating it with a PIN or biometric. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/no-one-knows-1-1024x559.png" alt="" class="wp-image-1489" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/no-one-knows-1-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/no-one-knows-1-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/no-one-knows-1-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/no-one-knows-1-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/no-one-knows-1-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> To the phone, the current user is the authorized user, and to the extent that the phone owner did, in fact, authorize someone else to use the phone, that secondary user is authorized to use the phone, but they are not the unique person the phone imagines it to be. Any further interactions through the phone, relying on that confidence, will inevitably be in error. This is a well known, but rarely discussed problem in digital identity. People regularly share passwords for convenience and expressions of intimacy. We let people sit at our desktop, while we are logged in to supposedly secure accounts. We hand people our phone unlocked and “authenticated”, giving full access to a range of capabilities as if they were the authorized party, even when that was never intended. Sharing our digital insurance card with the police officer during a routine traffic stop can give unintended access not just to content on the phone, but to actually act as the phone owner through that device. It is known that this is a common behavior, but because we don’t have good ways to stop it, digital identity engineers typically ignore it to address problems we have approaches to solve. Unless we physically observe the person in question, it is impossible to tell if that digital interaction is actually being driven by that particular person. Yes, you can add checks. Liveness detection is a good one. Time-limited authentication challenges is another. Proof of use of secret cryptographic information is a good and rigorous filter. But all of these are ways to increase confidence in the identity of the subject, not a way to guarantee it. Every single technique might be defeated, enabling an attacker to act as the subject with impunity. The confidenceMethod approach of the W3C Verifiable Credential community, currently under development, has set out to address precisely this problem, giving credential issuers additional ways to specify how the verifier of a given VC can increase their confidence that the current presenter has an appropriate relationship to the subjects in the credential. While we cannot know for sure who is on the other side of a digital interaction, we can use various techniques to increase our confidence that they are. Agents & Humanity Online Even if we build out these databases to their highest ambition, with World or Realeyes actually establishing a coherent system used by everyone on the planet, we still cannot guarantee that the alleged person on the other side isn’t an AI. And yet, that’s a fundamental promise of World and an implied expectation for Realeyes. The fact is, people never directly interact with the digital world. Mediated through sensors like cameras and keyboards, all digital data is subject to the errors of its sensors. I, as Joe Andrieu, never actually make a GET request to an HTTP endpoint; that’s what my browser does for me. It is literally impossible for a standard webserver to process any direct human action. All it can do is respond to signals coming in over the wire. Conceptually, we consider the browser a “user-agent” meaning that we believe it is currently operating under the direct guidance of a human user, as an authentic agent, realizing the user’s will based on gestures made in the browser itself. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/digital-claw-1024x559.png" alt="A person reaching through a digital interface, their hands becoming digital as they interact with objects on the other side." class="wp-image-1481" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/digital-claw-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/digital-claw-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/digital-claw-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/digital-claw-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/digital-claw-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Any given HTTP request might be generated by a bot. Even within the browser, any extension or web page can trigger HTTP requests without the user realizing it. When these actions violate user expectations, it’s considered an attack, but at the core of the digital world is digits transmitted over wires. Those digits are subject to attack at the source, even if we secure them in transit. It is effectively impossible, today, to restrict colluding remote users from allowing someone else to use technology intended for them alone. Delegation to Digital Agents is Inevitable The fact is, we, as humans, are going to delegate our digital authority to software acting on our behalf. To the extent that their actions are well-behaved, meaning they cost no more than normal human activity, I believe those agents should be allowed to carry out the tasks I ask of it. No amount of remote attestation will prevent a person from giving an AI control over their digital interactions. If that means giving agents access to our cryptographic keys so they can impersonate us, people will do that. So called “proof-of-control” or “proof-of-use” challenge-response techniques create a mathematical guarantee that the current user has use of cryptographic secrets we expect the user to keep secret, but that is not the same guarantee. There simply is no known way to cryptographically guarantee that the current user is the user we expect, no matter what kind of “holder binding” techniques you try. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/delegating-1024x559.png" alt="A room full of robots, exploring digital interfaces under the direction of a person." class="wp-image-1480" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/delegating-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/delegating-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/delegating-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/delegating-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/delegating-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Online interactions go from compute device to compute device across the network. Given current Internet architecture, we can always redirect the authentication to a proxy controlled by a colluding subject. Always. Which makes it essentially impossible to stop collusionary compromises where the data subject willingly gives their authentication capability or their authenticated device to another person. What we can do instead is use cryptography to explicitly delegate authorizations of limited scope to agents operating on our behalf, whether they are a bot or not. What we can do is ensure that the digital transmission received by an alleged specific user, has a cryptographic proof that it is acting on behalf of that user. Yes, this takes infrastructure we haven’t built yet that connects cryptographic actions to privacy-preserving in-person proof-of-humanity ceremonies, but it is at least technically possible. IMO, that’s the real solution: create privacy-preserving in-person proof-of-humanity ceremonies that generate credentials that can be used as the root identity for delegations to automated systems. In other words, instead of trying to detect AI, enable affirmative delegation by humans such that whatever software we authorize can act–and be regarded as acting–on our behalf while avoiding spam-bots and overzealous web crawlers. Digital Fiduciaries can help. Global Universal Identification Is Overkill For some things, you don’t need identification. The Red Cross famously doesn’t care if your identification documents were burned in your house fire. They will help you reestablish your life, giving you vouchers that get you into motels and gift certificates you can use to buy clothes and they don’t need to see your government ID. Their confidence is met by evaluating a real emergency and interacting with the real people affected by it, including law enforcement and first responders. For other things, even a RealID driver’s license is insufficient. If you want to fly a plane, launch a missile, or access secure facilities, additional confidence is required. Some facilities require biometric identification. Some don’t. Some require unique PINs coupled with unique digital cards. The fact is, for any given use case, secure systems are tailored to establish just the right level of oversight and assurance. In no use case do we see a legitimate need for a global human database. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="559" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sorry-dave-1024x559.png" alt="A robot denying access, saying "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"" class="wp-image-1476" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sorry-dave-1024x559.png 1024w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sorry-dave-300x164.png 300w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sorry-dave-768x419.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sorry-dave-1536x838.png 1536w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sorry-dave-2048x1117.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> We see the honest value is in contextualized, robust identification that combines digitally defensible mechanisms (e.g., encryption, signing, proof-of-use) with real-world, in-person identity assurance to enable identity-responsive services without reliance on centralized notions of who is or is not a human. We also see the danger of building a global database far outstripping any value it might create. The real effect of these systems of global uniqueness will be to reduce the humanity of those who aren’t part of the club. That’s simply not acceptable in a free society and it certainly is not acceptable as a global imposition by any individual or organization. It’s Turtles all the Way Down On a lighter note, as I wrote this, I realized that the tireless attempts of the naive to build a single digital perspective on everyone in the world is a bit of a Yertle the Turtle problem. The only way to win is not to play that game. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="769" height="1024" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/yertle-edited-769x1024.png" alt="Yertle the turtle on a tower of robot turtles." class="wp-image-1490" style="aspect-ratio:0.75;object-fit:cover;width:351px;height:auto" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/yertle-edited-769x1024.png 769w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/yertle-edited-225x300.png 225w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/yertle-edited-768x1023.png 768w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/yertle-edited.png 1153w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 769px) 100vw, 769px" /> Yertle, King of the pond, famously demanded he stand on the backs of all the turtles he could find so that he could see all that he commands, expanding his kingdom over everything he sees. He foolishly believed that if he could just see a little bit more–by making his subjects stand on top of each other’s backs–he increased his kingdom, only to find that no amount of turtles could reach a height that would bring the Moon under his domain. Digital Yertles imagine something similar: if only we could see everything in our domain, our rule will be glorious! If only we could identify everyone, including those who should not be part of our efforts, then we can finally build a system that appropriately works for every individual. It’s a slippery slope that none of us wants. If only we could see all the activity in our domain, then we can ensure all illegal activity is punished. If only we could track everything everyone does anywhere, then we can finally prevent these pesky crimes [insert favorite fear-based rallying cry] before they even happen. Imagining an “ideal information system” that tracks everyone on the planet is as shortsighted and ineffective as Yertle’s pile of turtles, as impractical and cruel as Bentham’s panopticon, and as dangerous and insidious as Orwell’s Big Brother. In short, that way lies surveillance madness. We can do better.
Identity is one of the most important constructs of society. It’s also one of the hardest to discuss. It is how we keep track of people and things and, in turn, how they keep track of us. When we build identity systems without a core understanding of identity, we risk inadvertently compromising human dignity. Continue reading →
Identity is one of the most important constructs of society. It’s also one of the hardest to discuss. I’ve been in perhaps hundreds of conversations in over a dozen years about user-centric and digital identity. I’ve realized that many of our challenges in digital identity stem from two problems in these conversations. First, miscommunication; we often use the same words with different meanings. Second, we get distracted by compelling but unproductive discussions about different aspects of identity. In response, I’ve begun a conversation about how to talk about identity in a way that is both accessible and rigorous. I want to find a way to discuss identity that laypeople understand, without alienating technologists. Digital identity—like the rest of our Internet-enabled world—is scaling faster than society knows how to handle. If we don’t develop a simple way for experts to talk with regular people about both identity and its realization in digital identity, it will be nearly impossible to build an Internet identity layer that fully addresses the needs of a modern global society. One way or another, that identity layer is being built. I believe a better conversation will make a difference. Consider for a moment a slightly different way to think about identity: Functional Identity. If the approach feels off or triggers a reaction, please drop me a line at joe@legreq.com. If we are to discover how to talk about this simply and effectively, your response is a valuable part of the discourse. Reframing Identity Our framing of identity determines how we talk about it. The facets of identity are so rich that we each bring our own hot buttons and agendas to any discussion. Some engage from a philosophical perspective, others cultural. Some dive into political issues and others get meta-physical and spiritual. These different frames are valid aspects identity’s impact on our lives. Not just valid. Vital. They help answer the question of “Why?” Why it matters, why we should care. Unfortunately, they also inflame passions. We often talk past each other to make points that have minimal relevance in other frames, leaving everyone frustrated and unheard. As an engineer, I’m concerned with how things work. I want to learn how to fix what’s broken and how to build new things. In short, I want to know how things function. With identity, this functional perspective sidesteps the inflammatory rabbit holes, without dismissing them. Once we understand how Identity works and how we use it, we can explore how different identity choices affect individuals and society. Functional Identity lets us investigate the HOW without prejudice to WHY, viewing identity systems based on how they work and then, in turn, how they affect individuals and society. A Functional Definition Identity is how we keep track of people and things and, in turn, how they keep track of us. That’s it. We learn people’s names, we observe them and hear gossip and consume media. We then apply that sense of who they are to our dealings with them. Others do the same in return. In computational systems, we assign identifiers, we accumulate observations, we correlate those observations with entities, we make conclusions based on those observations and we apply those conclusions in interactions with those same entities. In other contexts, we give people name tags, we share business cards, and we wear bracelets. All to facilitate keeping track of each other. This simple definition is provocative. It triggers associations with Big Brother and the surveillance state. It brings up ideas about embedded chips and tattooed serial numbers. It conjures fears of government or corporations constantly tracking what we do. Which is ok, because, in fact, those are the most feared abuses of identity. It’s important to realize when we talk about identity that we are always talking about how we keep track of people. There are also a number of wonderful uses of identity that are worth remembering. The joy of a child saying “Momma” or a lover calling out your name. The pride in your name on a diploma. The simple benefit of seeing another’s name tag at a workshop and better remembering that fascinating conversation. Identity enables so much good stuff *because* it helps us keep track of people and things. Like white space in visual design or writing, identity systems are also defined by how they prevent or minimize tracking. While identity is useful, too much tracking is untenable. Every identity system makes choices about efficiency and privacy, enabling specific means of tracking while limiting others. Realizing that the good consequences of identity inevitably enable the bad is fundamental to understanding how to build systems that appropriately balance the two. The functional approach reaches beyond digital systems to understand how identity works throughout society. By better understanding how identity functions, we will be able to build systems that enhance privacy and human dignity, while improving identity assurance and security. Why? Engineers, entrepreneurs, and financiers sometimes ask “Why?” Why are we spending so much time with navel-gazing conversations about identity? Why not just build something and fix it if it is broken? To be fair, I get why “Identity” with a capital “I” is banned in certain working groups. Those distracting conversations can derail productive efforts to build good systems and ship working code. And yet, there is a vitally important and simple reason to better understand identity: human dignity. When we build identity systems without a core understanding of identity, we risk inadvertently compromising human dignity. There are times when security concerns demand compromise. Fine. It’s the job of our political systems—local, national, and international—to moderate the worst abuses and to establish boundaries and practices that serve basic human rights. But when engineers unwittingly compromise the ability of individuals to self-express their identity, when our systems subject individuals to unreasonable restrictions and deny basic services because of a flawed understanding of identity, that’s an avoidable tragedy. What might seem minor today could lead to the loss of privacy, liberty, or even life for an individual whose identity is unintentionally compromised. That’s why it pays to understand identity, so the systems we build intentionally enable human dignity instead of accidentally destroy it. In a future column, we’ll discuss the elements of Functional Identity, with the eventual goal of defining the fundamental objects and methods that comprise any identity system, digital or otherwise. From there we can start to explore the impact on privacy and freedom and human dignity that different identity systems afford. In the meantime, I’m off to ID2020, a UN Summit about the potential for blockchain technology to help with UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9. We’ll be exploring how self-sovereign identity might enable us to create a legal identity for everyone on the planet by 2030, including birth registration. Not a small task. I hope you’ll join me as we continue the conversation. This article also appears at https://peoplecentered.net/2017/06/11/speaking-of-identity/
User Driven Services: 9. Self-managed Identity
9. Self-managed Identity User Driven Services let users manage their own online identity. Unless we control our identity online, we risk unnecessary exposure to identity theft and unwanted correlation of online activity. At the same time, online services increase the … Continue reading →
9. Self-managed Identity User Driven Services let users manage their own online identity. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-587" title="Name tag" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/dreamstime_4473313hello-my-name-iscropped.jpg" alt="Name tag" width="288" height="196" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/dreamstime_4473313hello-my-name-iscropped.jpg 480w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/dreamstime_4473313hello-my-name-iscropped-300x203.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 288px) 100vw, 288px" />Unless we control our identity online, we risk unnecessary exposure to identity theft and unwanted correlation of online activity. At the same time, online services increase the risk of attacks when using the same identifier for multiple functions. User Driven Services allow users to be in maximum control of their identity by distinguishing between the four different types of identifiers used online: Authentication IDs Presentation IDs Reference IDs Internal IDs Users should be able choose their own third-party identity service and have complete control over the three external identifiers used by any User Driven Service: their authentication IDs, their reference IDs, and their presentation IDs. The internal ids relating these external identifiers should never be exposed. Identity Providers should operate in non-correlation modes—so that different services providers automatically receive different authentication tokens, and all presentation IDs should be hand selected by the user for each service whenever possible. The ideal service will enable intentional correlation only upon user directive, allowing individuals to claim blog posts, social profiles, and microblogging accounts as their own, after initially anonymous or psuedonymous use. Services are also more flexible when they allow users to use multiple distinct identifiers within a given class, e.g., having more than one email address or online chat handle. Finally, when possible, services should allow for anonymous and anonymized use. Examples OpenID allows users to use a third party service for Single Sign On at millions of websites, bypassing potentially millions of usernames and passwords. Information Cards allow “clicking in” to relying websites rather than logging in, using the credentials and authentication of third party Identity Providers. Azigo’s RemindMe service allows users to selectively activate membership credentials, such as AAA or AARP affiliation, on specific websites for special offers and discounts—without divulging such affiliations to the website in question. Questions Does the service allow third party identity providers for managing authentication? Does the service fully distinguish all four identifiers used in online identy: Authentication ID–used for logins Presentation ID–used for labelling authorship and ownership Reference ID–used for referring to specific users, e.g., for sending messages Internal ID–used internally to link the other three IDs to each other and to appropriate privileges. Does the service allow users to modify and manage the three exposed identifiers: Authentication, Presentation, and Reference? Does the service allow users to have multiple identifiers in the same class, such as two email addresses or multiple chat handles? This article is part of a series. It is the ninth of ten characteristics of User Driven Services: Impulse from the User Control Transparency Data Portability Service Endpoint Portability Self Hosting User Generativity Improvability Self-managed Identity Duty of Care One more to go… This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number IIP-08488990. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect teh views of the National Science Foundation.
A functional model for best practice Identity implementations. The Identity Quartet is a framework for online services that allows users to express their Identity on their own terms. When I use the term “Identity”, I refer to the set of … Continue reading →
A functional model for best practice Identity implementations. The Identity Quartet is a framework for online services that allows users to express their Identity on their own terms. When I use the term “Identity”, I refer to the set of identifiers used in reference to users in online services. At the December 2008 Internet Identity Workshop, Randy Farmer introduced what he called the “Tripartite Model of Identity.” He presented a pattern distilled from years of groundbreaking work building virtual communities. This article is a write up of a four component model based on Randy’s initial concept. I also build on the ideas discussed at the IIW session on Non-correlatable IDs with OpenID. The Quartet In online systems, we use Identity in four roles, using four potentially distinct identifiers. Each of those four will be present in any system that allows users to login, present themselves online, and receive incoming services. Often, systems use the same identifier to fulfill multiple roles. However, there are good reasons that these identifiers should be managed separately, especially across organizational boundaries. The four identifiers are: Authentication IDs Presentation IDs Reference IDs Internal IDs Authentication IDs To access privileged services, users must present an identifier to claim their right to that service. Common identifiers include session IDs, cryptographic tokens, and usernames. Usernames are probably the most common identifier for logging into services. Paired with a password for authentication, this is a cornerstone of how we use identity to gain access to privileged services. That access authorization typically persists without logging in again through the use of a session ID. In a user-centric context we can separate the authentication ID used at a Relying Party with that used at the Identity Provider, allowing for directed identity as described by Kim Cameron in his Seven Laws of Identity. In a capability-based authentication regime, the identifier itself could contain a cryptographically signed delegation of authority for a particular privilege, but, in general authentication IDs don’t need to be that fancy. Presentation IDs Handles, nicknames, and character names are used to label content for display to others in the system. Often these presentation identifiers are humorous or obviously fictional, such as “HappyCamper” in an online chat or “Thor the Destroyer” in World of Warcraft. They need not relate to actual user characteristics, nor do they need to be unique. Their only role is to present a label as the author, owner, or embodiment of a post, comment, rating, or character. Just as there are multiple “John Smiths” in the New York white pages, there’s no reason there can’t be multiple accounts with the same presentation ID in an online community, as evidenced by the vast number of users with the handle “Jesus Jesus Jesus” on Facebook. In reciprocal multiplicity, online games like World of Warcraft often allow each user to create and simultaneously maintain multiple characters, with different names, avatars, descriptions, characteristics and property. Since presentation IDs are intended to be shown to a wider audience and because their uniqueness is not technically required, it is prudent to separate presentation identifiers from authentication. There is no need to advertise authentication identifiers widely, as that simply increases security risk by giving away a critical—and preferably secret—component required for accessing privileged services. Reference IDs Service requests need a way to refer to intended parties. The most prevalent reference identifier is the local-part in an email address, the part before the @ sign, e.g., “joe” in “joe@example.com”. This identifier allows users to contact one another, without referring to anything else (such as a blog post or a job listing). It should be unique for each intended incoming role (e.g., admin@example.com or joe@example.com), but there is no technical reason that any given user can’t have more than one reference identifier, as is commonly seen when multiple email addresses auto-forward to the same individual. Also, often for a given role, it makes sense for a reference identifier to forward messages to several individuals, e.g., admin@example.com could forward the email to three different users to improve the response time for handling the issue. Since this reference ID is intended to be used by users other than the recipient (that should be obvious!), it makes sense to distinguish it from authentication IDs used to access the system. Distinguishing the reference ID from the presentation ID allows users to receive directed incoming services (such as email) while displaying handles that are common to multiple users. Combined with an appropriate service endpoint, reference IDs allow for any number of incoming services to be provided in reference to that ID. Internal IDs Every system needs to keep track of which identifiers relate to each other and to specific privileges. For example, what email messages should be shown to the user with a particular authentication ID? And which users should be able to post to a bulletin board? Internal IDs link together the authentication, presentation, and reference identifiers in the system, allowing users who are logged in to a system to see the appropriate service interfaces and have particular services performed as directed, including the proper presentation of their Identity to fellow users. The internal identifier is typically the primary key in a database table managing the list of users, and may also be used in a permissions table to keep track of service privileges. Because it is an internal identifier, it need never be revealed to the outside world and, to minimize hacking, it shouldn’t be. Because it is completely internal, it can also enable anonymous access to services through appropriate anonymized mechanisms for authentication IDs. Separation of identifiers improves Identity Many systems use the same identifier for multiple roles, such as using your email address as your login username for a system, such as AOL once required (and might still). However, systems can be more robust, more flexible, and more secure if they explicitly delineate the four identifiers to help avoid unintended correlation and attack vectors. This is especially true across trust boundaries. Using your AOL login as the AOL email service endpoint simplifies the mental model for users new to online services at some minor cost to security by exposing the login id to everyone a user gives their email address to. Using your AOL username as a login to other services is asking for both a loss of privacy from cross-site correlation of your identity and attacks on your account login. Fortunately, the latest technology can avoid this—if we use it correctly. It isn’t just enough to enable OpenID, SAML, or Information Cards on our systems. For truly user-driven Identity we need to explicitly delineate the identifiers used for authentication, presentation, and reference from each other and internal identifiers, both within and between organizations. We should also enable users to choose their own identifiers for the first three… and keep the internal identifier completely secret. Examples Traditional System (with distinct identifiers) 1. Authentication ID jandrieu 2. Presentation ID Joe Andrieu 3. Reference ID joe@example.com 4. Internal ID 10485 OpenID 2.0 (in non-correlation mode, with distinct identifiers) Relying Party Identity Provider 1. Authentication ID http://joe.example.com 2. Authentication ID2 RP-specific Token from IDP 3. Presentation ID Happy Camper via Attribute Exchange 4. Reference ID joe@example.com available via Service Discovery 5. Internal ID 10485 987656 There’s no reason users can’t select their own authentication ID in each of the above situations, although in practice, the RP-specific token is usually dynamically generated on behalf of users. Similarly, Presentation IDs can easily be specified by users in either system, leveraging OpenID’s Attribute Exchange Extension when appropriate. The reference IDs can also be user defined in either of the above approaches, with OpenID allowing fourth parties to discover a user’s service endpoint and endpoint-specific reference ID for any service authorized by the user for that party. And clearly, the internal identifiers in all three situations have no innate need to be correlated with any of the others except through the secret internal ID. This allows for the maximum possible user choice and, potentially, maximum anonymity. The Identity Quartet pattern isn’t rocket science. In fact, it makes things simpler when it comes to security, maintenance, and user control. The Quartet makes systems more flexible and more secure while giving users more freedom to manage how they interact and present themselves online. It is one way to turn user-centric Identity services of OpenID and Information Cards into truly user-driven Identity. [Update: 4/17/2009 Revised “routing ID” to “reference ID”.]
Bandit, Higgins, Open Source, Profit and Novell
At EIC2008 last month, Dale Olds of Novell’s Bandit Project gave me a few minutes and some insight into how Novell (and others) are mixing open source with proprietary software to architect a whole new Identity paradigm online. I’ve been … Continue reading →
At EIC2008 last month, Dale Olds of Novell’s Bandit Project gave me a few minutes and some insight into how Novell (and others) are mixing open source with proprietary software to architect a whole new Identity paradigm online. I’ve been following the user-centric Identity movement ever since Doc Searls talked me into attending IIW2006b, an unconference. EIC is a classic Enterprise technology sales conference on identity management. The two events couldn’t be more different, even though both have excellent content and are focused on Identity. EIC was all about big business selling to each other, while IIW is all about engineers making user-centric Identity work. Identity? A lot of you are familiar with the term, but for those who might not know what I mean, I’m talking about how people authenticate themselves for access to online systems. Traditionally based on usernames and passwords, online Identity presents a host of problems, not the least of which is that an individual may have dozens or even hundreds of different usernames and passwords, one for each new web service or corporate LAN accessed. This proliferation is itself a security risk–as people reuse passwords despite the best efforts of zealous IT gurus everywhere. It is also an information management nightmare: how are we supposed to remember all of that? Which reinforces the problem of reused passwords and unfortunately typically insecure password reset. Today’s identity management software provides solutions to this problem, largely through federation and user-centric Identity. In short, federation is how corporate IT systems rely on other corporate systems–provided by other departments or even other companies–to authenticate your identity and share information about you. It can be used for authentication, or as in the case of FaceBook’s Beacon, it can be used to pass on highly sensitive personal data. (Blockbuster is now in a lawsuit over this, which I expect they’ll lose.) As Doc Searls likes to put it, federation is about large companies having safe sex with each other, using your data. You can see how this starts to relate to your offline identity, as bits and pieces of your data trail could be used to build a profile and steal your identity or use it for other nefarious purposes, like spamming you with “targeted” ads. In contrast, user-centric Identity is an architecture where individuals present the credentials of their choice for authentication at online services. Instead of the vendor-to-vendor systems integration and trust contracts of federation, “Relying Parties” authenticate a visitor by relying on the Identity services of an “Identity Provider” of the visitor’s choice. Relying parties may not accept all ID Providers, but in general, the choice of who authenticates your identity lies with you. Key technologies in this space are OpenID, InfoCards, and a variety of standards from the Liberty Alliance. These are the core of the conversation at IIW. Of course, you can do federation with a user-centric Identity architecture; that’s not the point. The point is that in the user-centric world, the user is in charge of their identity. Or, as Doc Searls advocates, in the user-driven world, the user is driving the transaction. So, when I sat down with Dale at EIC, I had already heard about Bandit—I even have the t-shirt—yet, I was wondering how Bandit fit into the whole mash up of technology behind user-centric Identity. I know that OpenID is a URL-based approach for identity that has generated significant traction because it is easy for relying parties to implement and for tech savvy users to use. I also know that Higgins and CardSpace both implement Information Cards, or InfoCards: one an open source, extendable client and server implementation, the other a polished proprietary client app from Microsoft. I even had some inkling of the various protocols created and under development by the Liberty Alliance, who started life as a federation standards group and has embraced user-centric approaches as it builds out its services stack. And I even knew about Sxipper and Vidoop, the first a client application that helps users manage their identity presentation online, whether the online services are user-centric or not, and the latter an Identity Provider with a unique method for verifying that you are you. But what I didn’t quite get was how Bandit fit into it all. I know they are supporters of Higgins and Information Cards, but is Bandit a client app like Sxipper? A card selector like CardSpace? Is it a server implementation that could be used by companies like Vidoop? Is it open source and if so, how does it fit into Novell’s business model? Dale was able to make it fairly clear: Bandit is an open source project supported by Novell. Bandit provided the card selector for the Higgins project and participate in OSIS (Open Source Identity Systems), a working group of the Identity Commons comprised of different Identity technology providers working towards interoperability. They also support the soon to be announced InfoCard Foundation, although there have been no official announcements by anyone yet about that particular project. Novell, as a separate entity, is putting engineering and organizational resources into these open source and interoperability efforts because they see a bright future in selling Identity management tools once we get the Internet Identity-enabled. That’s when the light went on. Bandit is about helping create the entire infrastructure of Identity, the Identity Meta-System, as Kim Cameron calls it. Once that infrastructure is in place, Novell will be able to sell companies a number of tools that make it easy to leverage that infrastructure. As Dale put it, the open source part of this is about enabling Identity: assuring that the basic plumping and services are present and understood. The subsequent business model is helping companies manage identity, once we have the essential plumbing in place. Think of it like http and HTML as enabling the world-wide-web, while products like Cold Fusion, IIS, and Drupal help companies manage web services. The web wouldn’t exist without the open source gift from CERN some fifteen years ago, and without that underlying plumbing of protocols and formats, software providers like Netscape, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and Novell, wouldn’t have made a dollar selling web technologies to anyone. Instead, with a web-enabled world, literally thousands of companies competed to provide web software, making billions of dollars in the process. Novell sees a similar dynamic with Identity. Clearly, so does Microsoft and Sun, and hundreds of other companies. So do I. And it looks pretty damn cool from here. p.s. my apologies for the lack of links and images. I realized I better post this before the real-time world overtakes me. I hope to see a bunch of you at IIW p.s. bonus link: Doc Searls on vendors bankrolling open source.
Majority of Americans dislike unauthorized use of behavioral data
From Yahoo News: Majority Uncomfortable with Websites Customizing Content Based Visitors Personal Profiles Level of Comfort Increases When Privacy Safeguards Introduced ROCHESTER, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A majority of U.S. adults are skeptical about the practice of websites using information about a … Continue reading →
From Yahoo News: Majority Uncomfortable with Websites Customizing Content Based Visitors Personal Profiles Level of Comfort Increases When Privacy Safeguards Introduced ROCHESTER, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A majority of U.S. adults are skeptical about the practice of websites using information about a person’s online activity to customize website content. However, after being introduced to four potential recommendations for improving websites privacy and security polices, U.S. adults become somewhat more comfortable with the websites use of personal information. Good stuff, although one should read closely to understand exactly what users dislike. Customization isn’t the problem… it’s the unauthorized invasion of privacy. The questions asked by Harris were rather leading. It would be interesting to see what people say to “if asked, would you allow a Search engine to provide enhanced results based on your behavior.” My understanding is most people do opt-in to the advanced features of Google desktop, which asks essentially the same question at install time. People don’t like surreptitious activities, but if you ask up front, it’s much easier for folks to say yes.
The Washington Post today exposed considerable excesses by “fusion” centers organized post 9/11. Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cellphone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and … Continue reading →
The Washington Post today exposed considerable excesses by “fusion” centers organized post 9/11. Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cellphone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. … Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues. … The list of information resources was part of a survey conducted last year, officials familiar with the effort said. It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like. Centers serving New York and other states also tap into a Federal Trade Commission database with information about hundreds of thousands of identity-theft reports, the document and police interviews show. Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos, while analysts in Rhode Island have access to car-rental databases. In Maryland, authorities rely on a little-known data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans. In its online promotional material, Entersect calls itself “the silent partner to municipal, county, state, and federal justice agencies who access our databases every day to locate subjects, develop background information, secure information from a cellular or unlisted number, and much more.” … “There is never ever enough information when it comes to terrorism” said Maj. Steven G. O’Donnell, deputy superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police. “That’s what post-9/11 is about.” The last statement pretty much sums up current institutional thinking on individual liberty and national security: in the fight against terrorism, we have a moral obligation to do everything we can. Everything. It’s scary how much that position echoes that of fascism. As promoted by Mussolini, fascism builds a moral framework based on the primacy of the state. Fasciste means a bundle of sticks, symbolizing that the group is stronger than any individual. Fascism extends that thinking, declaring that each individual’s rights exist only insofar as they support the state. Or to restate, in the defense of the state, there are no individual rights. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what anti-terrorist programs assert when claiming that terrorism trumps the rights and privileges of the suspect or accused. Due process, protection from unreasonable searches, freedom of speech. All of these have rights have been trampled on in the name of the War on Terror. The fusion centers are just one more institution created by the mindset that brought us illegal wiretaps, extraordinary extradition, secret prison camps, extra-territorial detention, and torture. I understand law enforcement’s position. It is easier to enforce laws when you know everything about everyone, just like in a police state (see The Lives of Others for an Academy Award-winning story of pre-information age East Germany’s police state). But it is impossible for a police state to generate the economic and social well-being that emerges in a free society… and it is that well-being which, ultimately, is the core of U.S. global power. Simply put, undermining freedom undermines US security. In contrast, consider the subtle brilliance of Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity, in particular, law 2: 2. Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use The solution that discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long-term solution. We should build systems that employ identifying information on the basis that a breach is always possible. Such a breach represents a risk. To mitigate risk, it is best to acquire information only on a “need to know” basis, and to retain it only on a “need to retain” basis. By following these practices, we can ensure the least possible damage in the event of a breach. At the same time, the value of identifying information decreases as the amount decreases. A system built with the principles of information minimalism is therefore a less attractive target for identity theft, reducing risk even further. By limiting use to an explicit scenario (in conjunction with the use policy described in the Law of Control), the effectiveness of the “need to know” principle in reducing risk is further magnified. There is no longer the possibility of collecting and keeping information “just in case” it might one day be required. The concept of “least identifying information” should be taken as meaning not only the fewest number of claims, but the information least likely to identify a given individual across multiple contexts. For example, if a scenario requires proof of being a certain age, then it is better to acquire and store the age category rather than the birth date. Date of birth is more likely, in association with other claims, to uniquely identify a subject, and so represents “more identifying information” which should be avoided if it is not needed. In the same way, unique identifiers that can be reused in other contexts (for example, drivers’ license numbers, Social Security Numbers, and the like) represent “more identifying information” than unique special-purpose identifiers that do not cross context. In this sense, acquiring and storing a Social Security Number represents a much greater risk than assigning a randomly generated student or employee number. Numerous identity catastrophes have occurred where this law has been broken. We can also express the Law of Minimal Disclosure this way: aggregation of identifying information also aggregates risk. To minimize risk, minimize aggregation. Whether or not you think the War on Terror is being handled well, it is a demonstrable fact that human systems fail. People make mistakes. And that means we can guarantee that institutions–even when acting in our own best interest–will make mistakes, like the admitted errors of the FBI, as reported by the NYT: F.B.I. Made ‘Blanket’ Demands for Phone Records WASHINGTON — Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly approved the use of “blanket” records demands to justify the improper collection of thousands of phone records, according to officials briefed on the practice. … Under the USA Patriot Act, the F.B.I. received broadened authority to issue the national security letters on its own authority — without the approval of a judge — to gather records like phone bills or e-mail transactions that might be considered relevant to a particular terrorism investigation. The Justice Department inspector general found in March 2007 that the F.B.I. had routinely violated the standards for using the letters and that officials often cited “exigent” or emergency situations that did not really exist in issuing them to phone providers and other private companies. F.B.I. Says Records Demands Are Curbed WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly obtained personal information on Americans in numerous terrorism investigations in 2006, but internal practices put in place since then appear to have helped curtail the problems, Bush administration officials said Wednesday. The Justice Department’s inspector general is expected to issue a report in coming weeks that updates the findings of a major investigation last year into the F.B.I.’s use of so-called national security letters, which allow investigators to obtain telephone, e-mail and financial information on people involved in investigations without a court warrant. Last year’s report caused an uproar in Congress when it was disclosed that the F.B.I., under powers granted by the USA Patriot Act, had misused its authority to gather records in thousands of instances from 2003 to 2005. The new report from the inspector general will examine the bureau’s use of the records demands in 2006. At the end of the day, this isn’t about any particular individual, nor even any particular violation of our constitutional rights. It’s about addressing the systemic problems of the information age. There will always be threats to national security. There will always be the drive to get as much data as possible into the hands of a few, elite law enforcement agencies, capable of acting in the “public good”. And there will always be those individuals who break the rules, whether for good intent or malicious device. We don’t need conspiracy theories to point out the dangers of centralizing all the information about everybody. What we need is an open-eyed approach to building information systems on user-centric principles, such as Cameron’s seven Laws of Identity. Do that and a vast number of systemic risks of the information age go away.
Last week was the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, California, which is, without reservation, the most productive technical gathering I know of. An “unconference,” (facilitated by the incomparable Kaliya Hamlin) it dumps the talking heads for interactive discussions so … Continue reading →
Last week was the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, California, which is, without reservation, the most productive technical gathering I know of. An “unconference,” (facilitated by the incomparable Kaliya Hamlin) it dumps the talking heads for interactive discussions so that folks can get real work done. The culture and focus enable a truly impressive amount of collaboration and co-creation as people dig in and work on the hard stuff of Internet Identity. And there is a TON of hard stuff. Just ask Microsoft and Kim Cameron, whose CardSpace is making up for the failures of Passport. Or anyone who thought PKI (public key infrastructure) would solve the problems of Internet Identity. Or David Recordon and the folks of OpenID who brilliantly solved the challenge of a user-centric Single Sign On only to find that was just the first of many challenges of Identity and then answered in part with OpenID 2.0 and OAuth, and continue to answer collaboratively with the rest of the IIW community. One of the hardest problems discussed at IIW is how we apply the open approach of the Internet to traditional buyer/seller relationships. When customers can come from anywhere and leave at any time, the silo-based world of proprietary lock-in is rapidly becoming outdated. It is not just unsavory for customers, it is actually damaging to vendors who doggedly defend their CRM systems and industrial era mindset. Fixing this problem is what VRM is all about. In a planning workshop before IIW, a few of the early contributors to VRM met and started to map out the simplest use case we could think of: changing your primary postal address. We’ve all had to do it and it rarely goes smoothly. In the US, it often starts with a Change of Address card sent to the USPS, plus updates to magazine subscriptions, credit card companies, the IRS and the Department of Motor Vehicles, utility companies, ad nauseum… and eventually emails or letters to those friends we want to inform. It is structurally ideal for the user as the point of integration, since ultimately only the user knows for sure when and where they are moving. What we found was that even this seemingly “simple” use case required a lot of baselining, normalization of language, and formal abstraction to fully clarify the details of what should happen when designed for the users’ needs rather than the vendors’. In the end (with about 80% completion) it boiled down to a three-step abstract use case narrative, five requirements, and 5 supporting use cases (6 with the base case) for two actors, the AddressChanger and AddressUser: Use Case Narrative AddressChanger decides to move AddressChanger expresses new address to system (optionally including scheduling information) AddressUsers get the new address when they need it Requirements Address stored independently of any particular vendor Owner of address can choose who stores canonical source (self-storage ok) Data should be in an open format and portable without data or service loss Data transfer and use is always under user control Vendors can discover the appropriate service for each user Supporting Use Cases AddressChanger Changes Address (base case) AddressChanger Manages Address Holder Permissions (and data subsets) AddressChanger Accesses Audit Report AddressChanger Reviews Address AddressUser Gets Current Address (pull) AddressUser Subscribes to Address Changes (push) This level of definition specifically leaves the design and implementation details up to subsequent engineering. The first step for VRM is to formally define the requirements of the system in the individual’s terms. Once we agree on that, we can move to specifics of how the requirements can be met. For instance, in the above definition, the user may or may not directly interface with an “Address Service”. The expression of a new address and the authorization management could all–theoretically–happen at standards-compliant vendor websites (who are in effect acting as the Address Service). For example, when I tell Amazon I have a new address, they could automagically update the cloud so that other authorized vendors get that address, and those “authorized” vendors could have been set up at the same time I signed up for their service. Use cases 5 and 6 are alternative design choices, but the consensus was that a standard system should allow the users to make that choice rather than restricting it at this stage. As we make design choices, we can clarify the challenges and additional requirements those design choices imply. Those design choices will in turn suggest further use cases, which, in the case of VRM, can be considered for further development and standardization if merited. For example, Amazon currently lets me maintain any number of addresses of record… how would we update the Use Model for the Address Service to allow multiple addresses, including the additional authorization complexities? Plaxo, in contrast, allows two addresses, a personal and a business address, which syncs nicely with their permissions framework for who gets updates to which address. What do these usage situations imply for the entire use model? How should/might we expand the use model to standardize how this advanced functionality is supported in a cross-platform user-centric way? We then took the simple use case as outlined above and worked through a Gap Analysis, led by Brett McDowell with Paul Madsen, Paul Trevithick, Andy Dale, Doc Searls, and Drummond Reed contributing, among others. That conversation morphed from the AddressChanger use case to the AddressUser to map out how current technologies implement this use case, including any overlap and missing pieces. Here’s what we came up with: It is more than a bit technical and without a good discussion, it is hard to understand the details (I will point out that the BA in the cloud is British Airways, one of many AddressUsers in the system). Yet, this is the magic of IIW, this is the hard stuff, collaboratively worked out by folks who are intimately involved with all of the competing technologies… because at the end of the day, without interoperability, Identity (and VRM) are just another proprietary data service. Here’s Paul Madsen’s post-IIW reflection and continuation on the Address Change use case. Good stuff. You can clearly see how the “simple” use case outlined above starts to address sophisticated real-world situations. You can also see how this is just the beginning of a conversation that both explores and defines some critical uses of both Identity and VRM. Paul outlined specifically how the WSF framework could implement the use case with particular design choices along the way, such as when & where the user interfaces with the Address Service. The same scenario could also be implemented with Liberty’s framework or OpenID+OAuth. And as Paul states, just about any aspect of Identity could be managed this way. And for some use cases, we need even further specifications, such as how we manage Personal Health Care records or how a Personal RFP is structured, propagated, and responded to. I’m looking forward to moving this forward and transforming more of these “simple” use cases into consensus requirements for reinventing the modern marketplace, or as we like to call it, VRM. Bonus link: a great post by Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software on the value of solving the hard problems.