Manage your online identity.

Today, Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington released A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, calling for services to support a more open approach to identity information. The document is simple and effective:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Not only are we proud to support this bill of rights, but I’m happy to report that we’re also in compliance with it.  At ClaimID, we’ve long innovated in the open-identity space; our work with MicroID and our deployment of OpenID-based social networks stand in evidence.  At the same time, we’ve always respected your identity rights, giving our users control to do what they’d like with their data.  We’ve always known that being open and forthwith is the right approach, and we’re certainly pleased to see these values gaining so much traction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under MicroID, OpenID, Projects, claimID.