Thursday, August 03, 2006

Is NetIDMe the right way to go?

Rob Wilton writes about Net-ID-Me on his blog and raises a few issues about it.

While I agree with the issues he rasied, there's another, perhaps more sinsister issue in that this appears to be a single centralized provider which can track users and their associations -- the exact same stuff that the privacy folks complained about when Microsoft wanted to do it.

At the minimum, a more federated approach provided by multiple vendors and, even better (Dick Hardt will love this) a direct, user-to-user without a third party, usage model (perhaps using some form of signed credential like a driver's license) would be even better.

I realize protecting our kids is important to all of us and try to do so for my kids, but I have real concerns about this big-brother-in-the-sky solution.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good point... without seeing a protocol flow, it's hard to tell what degree of panopticality this represents, but it's a valid concern. It's also another one of those aspects which is more likely to hinder adoption by the target demographic.