Thursday, January 12, 2006

ARCast - The Laws of Identity

If you ever wanted a gentle introduction to Kim Cameron's "7 Laws of Identity" you could do a lot worse than listen to this radio programme where he gets interviewed by Ron Jacobs.

There are some real gems from Cameron in this.

"Privacy concerns ultimately end up being security concerns."

So an approriately designed identity layer of the Internet would be equivalent to a privacy enhancing layer.

He talks about Toby Stevens notion of data rejection being the highest form of data management.

He mentions his signature is in thousands of scanned databases, so what now is the value of his signature?

And when it comes to building an identity layer for the Net notes that as architects and technologists we have to assume our system will be breached, so that we're ready to react appropriately when they are. If a decent identity layer is not built into the Net then people will rapidly get fed up with the negative consequences to the extent that all trust in the infrastructure will be lost. We also have to build the system in such a way as to avoid locking out the possibility of innovative developments in identity architecture in the future. We're just at the begining of what identity systems can be technologically and there are some amazing developments in universities, so we have to be able to build these into the system when they are developed.

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