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OSW: Simon Grice - Personal Digital Identity (PDID)

Founder and CEO of Midentity.

identityblog.com - Kim Cameron from Microsoft has written the seven laws of digital identity.

The last 1000 years... letters of introduction, passports, driving licences, etc.
The next 1000 years... personal digital identity

Why now? Tipping point approaching... everyone has tens of places they need a username and password (or use the same username and password, even though they know they shouldn't...)

A PDI is a network resident collection of (or pointers to) personal data that should or could be under the management of the individual.

Other organisations already have a lot of this data, but they control it rather than us, and often manage it poorly - hence double-glazing phone calls, junk mail, etc. And has to be updated in each place - if you move house you have to tell everyone individually of your new address.

Mobile devices are the 1st true pervasive identity authentication device. Ties in to how the BBC (Tom Coates talk) are using mobile phones and text messages to prevent spam to their phonetags system 'cos they know who's been tagging.

The Internet and google, etc. means none of us are anonymous now.

Flipside is that the ability to be anonymous should be built into a system.

To learn more about it, think about attending the Personal Digital Identity Summit. 17th and 18th November in London.

Questions

Suw Charman asked (unsurprisingly, given her nascent UK digital rights group) - Are companies holding more data than they need for longer than they need? Simon urged everyone to go and ask a company (such as a phone company) for all the data they hold on you. You have the right to ask for it, and the company can only charge £10 to give it to you. When he tried it with Vodafone, he got a list of locations he'd been at over the past six months that they were holding.

Not necessarily a concern about what Vodafone would do with the data, but the concern over what someone else could do with the data, if they could get hold of it (by court order, for example).

How easy was it to build your company in the UK, rather than in San Francisco? Bloody hard work. Hard to get funding over here. All the usual stuff of managing a small group of people.

An interesting guy with, I think, a good attitude to the problems.

Posted by Adrian at September 9, 2005 03:44 PM | TrackBack