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[Dave Birch] Announcing the eighth annual Digital Identity Forum in London on November 20th and 21st 2007. The event, sponsored by CoreStreet and CPP with support from ACI Worldwide, will be held at The Clink in Southwark. This year the Forum will be structured around four main areas:

1. Who Needs Digital Identity? And what do they need it for? As a first step on the road to safe and effective e-business, e-government, e-health and e-everything else, let’s try and analyse and understand what the “identity problem” actually is so that we can work out what to do about it in at 21st century context.
2. Understanding Context. What should decision makers look at when surveying the technology landscape? New standards and schemes? New networks and devices? New structures and models? This session will help you to map out that landscape and understand how CardSpace and OpenID, NFC and EMV fit together.
3. The Identity Utility. The discussions around identity cards, identity for the mass market and the business case for identity are stuck because of limited models and the vision around them. A new vision, however, with some promise can be founded on a utility-based approach which will be explored in this session.
4. Authentication is the new Content. If digital identity does indeed begin to transform the mass market, then one of the consequences might be that authentication takes are pivotal role in the value network. In which case, it’s good to start planning to take advantage of it now. Who could play in that market?

The Digital ID Forum will continue its tradition of developing the debate around the future of identity by bringing together informed and expert perspectives to stimulate discussion, thinking and ideas. Here’s what people said about it last year…

an exceptionally good conference this week…

the quality of the speakers, the audience and the debate (and the food!) was fantastic…

very stimulating conference yesterday and today – the formal content and the networking were excellent…

a great day as usual…

the key benefits were the networking opportunities which are facilitated by such a wide-ranging programme.

The detailed agenda will be available from the Forum web site at the end of this month. This year we will have representatives from organisations ranging from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Identity and Passport Service to Visa Europe and Garlik, once again ensuring first-class debate, high-speed learning and stimulating new ideas in equal measure.
We’re now taking the early bird bookings for this year’s Digital Identity Forum. If you go to the web site and book before 20th September, you’ll get £50 off, meaning that two full days of discussion and debate at the leading edge of digital identity will cost a mere UKP395 + VAT. Once again, the Forum will be limited to 100 places so book now to avoid disappointment!
We look forward to seeing you at this year’s event.

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Continue reading “The Forum is open for business”

[Dave Birch] Not sure how to introduce this week’s podcast! It’s Jane Adams interviewing me about the book Digital Identity Management that was published earlier in the year. Jane is a freelance journalist and consultant. She used to edit World Card Technology and writes regularly for European Card Review as well as for corporate clients. She has written two research reports about smart cards, the Smart Card Reporter for Elsevier and Smart Cards in Healthcare for HBS Consulting. Here she talks to me about the book that I edited, “Digital Identity Management: Technological, Business and Social Implications”. Jane thought it might be good to put me on the other side of the microphone for a change!

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Continue reading “Dave Birch on Digital Identity Management”

[Dave Birch] Like every other new technology that leaks into mainstream media, the cycle from “hey wow isn’t this amazing” to “this is the end of civilization as we know it” is predictable if shortening in duration. Now it’s social networking’s turn. Anyone who is interested in the future of identity has to be interested in the models being forged in the Reed’s Law furnace of MySpace, Facebook, Bebe and the like, that much is clear. These subnetworks are already vast: Facebook now has more than 3.5 million users in the UK, MySpace has more than 10 million users and Bebo has 4 million unique visitors. Friends Reunited is the champion, though, with 18 million users registered in the UK. But is the sky really falling in? I don’t doubt for a moment that that some people are putting details such as such as date of birth, address, email, job and marital status on their pages and that these are useful to potential fraudsters. A recent snapshot of Facebook turned up some useful statistics about this: more than 40% of Facebook users reveal some “sensitive” personal data and more than 20% gave personal data to a spoof friend request from a plastic frog called Freddi Staur. Of those, four-fifths gave their full date of birth and current address. It seems to me that the real risks are less about identity fraudsters trawling Facebook — when they have much better large scale data sources — than the long-term impact of posting pictures of yourself throwing up after drinking a bottle of cider.

Technorati Tags: privacy, social networking

Continue reading “Social networking good/bad?”

[Dave Birch] I’ve been think about a recent Guardian Unlimited article that began by posing the big question: how do you cut online crime, tackle child pornography, halt crippling viruses and get rid of spam? The article then goes on to talk about a couple of research projects: researchers in the US want at least $350m (£175m) to build the Global Environment for Network Innovations (Geni) and in Europe, similar projects are under way as part of the EU’s Future and Internet Research (Fire) programme, which is expected to cost at least £27m. While this will undoubtedly be money well spent, I think that Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, cuts to the core of the issues with his comment:

There’s a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you’re talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you’re really doing so.

The backers of Geni are hoping that it can find answers to problems like this. It is supported by America’s National Science Foundation and has a timescale of 10-15 years. Hhhmmm. Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a professor at Rutgers University in New York, says

Once you’ve built something as large and complex as the internet it is difficult to start over again.

Quite, but do we really need to?

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Continue reading “The next Internet will be built on identity”

[Dave Birch] Well I suppose I should get with on with some work, but I’ve been distracted by thinking about something else and could use some feedback. I’m preparing a presentation on the history of the technology of money, and I’ve come up with a caegorisation which seems to work, but because I made it up I’m not sure if it has any resonance. Essentially, I need to divide the history of the technology of money in three (because things always get divided into three for this sort of thing) and make some points about the dynamics with each “segment”. So here goes.

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[Dave Birch] If you are in the U.K. and interested in identity, it’s difficult to stay away from the subject of the national identity card, especially now that procurement is about to begin. Today I was thinking about audit. The head of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) recently said in an online webchat on the Downing Street website that most uses of the ID card will probably not involve accessing the NIR and would therefore not create an audit trail. He means “an audit trail in a central government database” because, of course, your identity card is perfectly capable of recording who has asked it for what. If you want to go home and put your ID card into your Sky box and see on the TV who interrogated your card, then you should be able to. This is quite distinct from the issue of the central audit trail, which cannot possibly work in a transparent manner. If you log on to the IPS website to see who’s been looking at your personal details, and it tells you that the police or MI5 have, then you might take that as a sign to leave the country. Perhaps as a practical experiment the government should let non-celebrity status people see who has been accessing their children’s personal details on the ContactPoint identity register for the under-16s and see how it goes.

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Continue reading “The 800ln gorilla in the digital identity room”

[Dave Birch] A very pleasant evening out at Mobile Monday in London talking about digital identity in the mobile world was made even more pleasant because Ajit was on the expert panel with me. He made a couple of points about reputation that deserved further discussion but there wasn’t time. He reminded me that Colin at Bankwatch had pointed me to this quote: “Somebody who has carved violins all his life should have more editing power than me on Wikipedia’s Stradivarius page”. A couple of months ago (but I can’t remember exactly when), I heard one of the founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, being interviewed on the BBC and he was talking about the viability (from my perspective, the desirability) of an economy founded on pseudonyms and reputation. He made complete sense, as did Ajit. I’m coming round to the view that this should be one of the expert panel topics for the forthcoming Digital Identity Forum in London on November 20th/21st.

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Continue reading “Anchoring the reputation economy”

[Dave Birch] This week’s podcast features Peter Brown. Peter, based in Vienna, is co-chairman of the e-government standards group set up by the European standardisation body CEN. Here he talks about the public sector approach to interoperability, crucial to the use of digital identity on a large scale, and uses the “Austrian model” to highlight some ideas in that field.

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Continue reading “Peter Brown, Pensive”

[Dave Birch] How would you tell a fake Rolex from a real one? I have no idea, since it’s not a position I ever expect to be in. It doesn’t really matter to me, but it clearly does matter to some people. One such group might be people buying Rolex’s on eBay. Fortunately, a German court has come to their aid by demanding that eBay tell real Rolex watches from fakes. Now, it’s clearly a problem to luxury brands that people are selling bent copies on eBay (although, frankly, if someone is flogging a Rolex for £50, you’d think the buyer would know what they are getting). The brands try to sue eBay rather than the actual seller because… actually, I don’t know why but I’m not a lawyer. Anyway a German court has agreed with the brands. Lawyers, eh? I agree with Techdirt: I don’t understand why this is a problem of the market. As they point out, you’ve been able to buy fake Rolexes on the streets of New York City, but Rolex doesn’t sue the New York City government for letting this happen. It recognizes that most people know that the Rolex you buy from a street vendor probably isn’t real and has introduced programs to designate legitimate Rolexes on eBay already — so this seems like the type of “problem” that could work itself out without making eBay liable, but apparently it’s too late for that. But I’m not sure why they care: I can’t afford a Rolex, so if I buy one at a car boot sale or in China, Rolex isn’t losing a sale. But by wearing the fake, I’m presumably advertising the desirability of a Rolex.

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Continue reading “The Rolex premium”

[Dave Birch] The forecasts for the prepaid market have been bullish for a while. One recent survey put prepaid card spending at $64 billion in 2004, $113 billion this year and predicts $178 billion by 2010, although the rate of growth that is predicted is lower. But it’s a big business. As previously discussed, it’s steadily shifting to the big networks. Aite’s survey says that Visa/MC/etc cards will have 44% of the prepaid market by 2010 compared with only 20% in 2004. About two-thirds of their volume comes through cards issued on behalf of government agencies and corporate clients. This is in contrast with private-label cards (eg, the iTunes card I gave to my son last week) which are predominantly issued by retailers. Note that while the survey predicts the total number of prepaid cards in the U.S. will be 7 billion in 2010 (compared with 4.3 billion this year) they will still account for only 1.6% of personal consumption expenditures (PCE).

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