Manage your online identity.

Volker Scheuber writes about his adventure coming to the US and getting proper ID as part of the Novell Cool Blogs. He’s here to continue his work on identity management software.

He arrives with some elegantly simple conclusions.

with my relocation to the states my understanding of identity got re-defined.

lesson learned: as long as i do not have any kind of u.s. id, i will be a suspect, no matter how good my record is back in switzerland or anywhere else. there is no such thing like global identity federation. good or bad? i haven’t decided on that, yet.

lesson learned: my identity is nothing i own. others own it for me. if they screw up, i’m screwed up. my biometrics don’t matter, my record doesn’t matter. only the record that others have of me matters and determines their actions regarding me.

lesson learned: having an identity is not enough. you need the right type of identity. the environment you are in defines what the right type of identity is. the environment you are in also sets the rules how to obtain it.

lesson learned: good records tied to the wrong identity don’t help. good records need to be tied to the right identity. records cannot be transferred from one to another identity.

All of these things are true.  Identification verification is hard.  Security is important.  Trust is an unknown in a system as big as ours.  Because of this complexity, we strive to have secure models that are hard to forge and hard to game.

ClaimID is not a complex system.  It is loosely coupled.

It is the conversation the other systems are ignoring.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 5:12 pm and is filed under claimID.