Kim Cameron posted his Second Law of Identity

The Minimal Disclosure Law of Identity

The solution which discloses the least identifying information is the most stable, long-term solution.

This got me thinking that the basis of identity is to enable discrimination. I then realized that the negative, emotional response to universal IDs is a fear of unjustified or undesired discrimination through data correlation. Racism and sexism being the more evocative “isms”. We can “blame” the movie (or book for older people )* 1984 for surfacing this as a fear of the future.

Of course we all want positive discrimination per the Clue Train Manifesto and as Doc Searls promotes he wants in his relationships as a customer.

Tying this back to Kim’s Second Law, I agree with the law. Perhaps Kim may expand more on the basis for the law and how discrimination fits in.

When we were designing SXIP, we intuitively knew this law. A talk at the first DIDW demonstrated that in the digital world, we could provide much more granularity in the information we disclose than in the physical world. It is easy to have thousands of digital assertions about you, such as “I am over 19″, “I am over 21″, “I am under 65″. Each of these only discloses the amount of information I may need to disclose to conduct a transaction. In the Real World, when I show my driver’s license or passport, the entity receiving the information is obtaining more data then they likely need such as my name, address, date of birth: when all the need to know is that I am old enough to buy a bottle of wine. The issue (as Kim’s law points out) is that the additional information may be used maliciously. This increase in privacy that is possible in the virtual world is very compelling.

*Dave Kearns helpfully pointed out there was the book before the movie. “Doh” … I even read it in high school.

John Levine wrote a cynical, but accurate account of the Summit that reflects the sad state of solving the spam issue.

The FTC Authentication Summit: “The Federal Trade Commission and NIST had a two-day Authentication Summit on Nov 9-10 in Washington DC. When they published their report explaining their decision not to create a National Do Not Email Registry, the FTC identified lack of e-mail authentication as one of the reasons that it wouldn’t work, and the authentication summit was part of their process to get some sort of authentication going. At the time the summit was scheduled, the IETF MARID group was still active and most…”

(Via CircleID.)

Dave Kearns wrote about Sxip in his recent newsletter.

I am speaking at New Media BC tomorrow (actually, it is later today, I just have not gone to sleep yet). Hopefully the food is good, and they serve coffee.

Amazon released the beta of the Amazon Simple Queue Service. Phil Windley covered it as did ZDNet. Being in the Identity space though, I was most interested in the posting at ars tehcnica.

You know, it occurs to me that Amazon already has the foundation of a sort of “centralized Internet login” function, in the form of their “tip jar” application and affiliate program. In just a few clicks, I can use my Amazon account to send revenue to a 3rd party, with or without the purchase of a book. So I think the next step for Amazon is an MS Passport competitor. Think about it. They’ve already got your credit card number, shipping address, etc. on file, and now they’re trying to insinuate themselves into the architecture of the Internet by providing back-end services for distributed applications.

I learn how to use a program by right clicking on things to see what they will do. I was using Address Book to copy an address for someone to meet me at, and noticed the “Map of” item. Curious as usual, I selected and up popped Mapquest with the location mapped! Of course it would be cooler if I could configure which mapping engine was used

The Vancouver Sun ran an article on Sxip. My buddy Marc Cantor decided he would post it. on his blog without permission.

The Universal Digital Identity story was publicly accessible and had the “Sound Off” feature which allows any yahoo individual to post comments. This was instructive as it demonstrates the visceral reaction people have to their identity. Many of the expressed concerns were clearly addressed in the article. Useful exercise in learning how to message what we are doing at Sxip.

Here is the “cute” but “serious” photo of me in the article: