[Clips] New Ways to Prove You Are Who You Say You Are Online

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


  Delivered-To: rah at shipwright.com
  Delivered-To: clips at philodox.com
  Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 19:08:27 -0400
  To: Philodox Clips List <clips at philodox.com>
  From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] New Ways to Prove You Are Who You Say You Are Online
  Reply-To: clips-chat at philodox.com
  Sender: clips-bounces at philodox.com

  <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB115456348562125178.html>

  The Wall Street Journal


  New Ways to Prove You Are
  Who You Say You Are Online
  As Web-Safety Worries Grow,
  Range of Services Help Users
  Verify Each Other's Identities

  By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

  August 3, 2006; Page D1

  Rob Barbour has found a new way of enhancing his reputation online:
  showcasing his newly verified identity. When he put up an eBay Inc. listing
  a few weeks ago, the Ashburn, Va., technology consultant embedded a link to
  his new online profile on verification service Trufina Inc.

  He soon will paste the link in his emails and on a Web site where he sells
  software and offers programming advice. "I needed a tool that will prove to
  somebody that this is who I am," says Mr. Barbour, 39 years old.

  Proving who you are is increasingly important on the Web, amid growing
  concern that pervasive Internet fraud is making it difficult to know whom
  to trust. In response, companies are developing a slew of new tools to help
  people confirm their identities. The new services allow consumers to create
  and share verified personal profiles with people they meet or do business
  with online.


  In recent weeks, many of these services have announced new partnerships
  with popular social-networking, shopping and dating sites, which face
  particular pressure to keep out cyber crooks. Trufina, which has recently
  joined up with dating sites like HonestyFirst.com and Loveaccess.com,
  relaunched last week with a wider menu of verification tools. Opinity Inc.,
  a new profile-sharing service that verifies a user's age, hometown and, in
  coming weeks, education and employment history, has recently announced
  partnerships with social-networking sites like GoingOn.com, classified site
  Edgeio.com and technology-news site CNET.com. IDology Inc., which performs
  age and identity checks on customers for high-end online merchants, will
  this week announce a deal with Zoey's Room, a networking site for girls,
  marking the first time its age and identity-verification technology will be
  part of a social-networking site.

  Whether they're shopping, chatting, doing business or looking for dates,
  consumers are increasingly on edge about online safety. In 2005, 59% of
  Americans "completely or strongly" agreed that Internet-based financial
  transactions were secure, down from 70% in 2003 according to Informa
  Research Services. A recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life
  Project found that 66% of Internet users believe online dating is dangerous
  because it puts personal information online.

  Concerns about the safety of minors, in particular, have exposed the need
  for more effective ways to confirm a person's identity than a user name and
  a password. Social-networking sites attempt to protect their members by
  imposing minimum age restrictions but can't easily enforce them. News
  Corp.'s MySpace.com, which requires members to be at least 14 years old,
  told Congress in June that it is looking at age-verification technology but
  hasn't yet found any effective options.

  Proposed solutions for protecting children from online predators are
  controversial. Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that
  bans social-networking sites and chat rooms from schools and libraries that
  receive certain federal funding. The bill, which has been criticized as too
  broad and blunt by some online-privacy groups, has been referred to a
  Senate committee.

  A growing number of businesses, too, are using online verification services
  to check out their customers. Wine company Kendall-Jackson uses IDology's
  age-verification technology to confirm that new customers on two of its
  e-commerce sites are at least 21 years old, and it plans to implement
  more-comprehensive identity verification soon to help combat credit-card
  fraud. Ice.com, an online jeweler, uses IDology's tools to authenticate
  buyers whom it flags as high-risk, which include those with particularly
  high transaction volumes or mismatched addresses.

  Microsoft Corp. is addressing online-safety concerns by constructing its
  own identity technology from scratch. The technology, called Windows
  CardSpace, is in a very early stage but will be built into its upcoming
  Windows Vista operating system. CardSpace allows users to log into Web
  sites by clicking on different digital credentials, or information cards.
  Users could create their own information cards or they could get the
  credentials issued to them by a trusted party, like a bank. (Microsoft
  doesn't host or store the identity information; it just provides the
  technology for its transfer.) CardSpace is meant to be more secure and
  useful than passwords because information cards can hold more information,
  like an address or a credit-card number, and can be backed by a third party.

  International Business Machines Corp., Novell Inc. and various other
  academics and vendors are working together on a similar project. Their
  technology, dubbed "Project Higgins," would be open-source.

  But radically new tools like these won't be rolled out widely before next
  year. In the meantime, current services tend to focus on creating a trusted
  profile that can be used across sites or shared. The services, which
  collaborate with background-checking companies of the sort corporations use
  to research future hires, often check attributes like age, address, gender,
  education, employment and whether a person has a criminal record. Most
  services provide a basic verification of name, email, and sometimes address
  free of charge. Anything more can cost up to around $15 a year. The
  information is typically checked against credit-bureau records and other
  publicly available data, like property listings and databases of known
  criminals and sex offenders.

  To sign up, users enter their personal data and are sometimes asked to
  answer a series of tricky multiple-choice questions no one else will likely
  be able to answer, such as the size of their last mortgage payment. Some
  details are confirmed automatically; others take time. On Trufina, a basic
  verification takes two to three minutes, with a background check usually
  taking less than 10 minutes, says Christian Madsen, chief executive of the
  College Park, Md., company.

  Users can sign up through the services' own home pages or through a partner
  site, where some of the costs are absorbed into other membership fees.
  Loveaccess.com, an online-dating site with two million members, charges
  customers $145 for a year of its premium service, which requires a Trufina
  background check.

  Currently, the services aren't in widespread use. Indeed, some consumers
  complain that their verified profiles aren't yet particularly helpful. Max
  Markidan, a 26-year-old management consultant in Arlington, Va., says he
  doesn't find it useful for professional networking because few users beyond
  dating sites appear to have adopted it. "I am married, so I can't really
  use Trufina at this point," he says.

  The companies' partnerships with popular sites will make or break their
  adoption, analysts say, by providing them with necessary revenue and more
  users.

  While many of the services aim to assuage privacy concerns, they may run up
  against them, too. Briana Doyle, a 24-year-old from New Westminster,
  British Columbia, joined Opinity last month hoping it would help her
  aggregate personal information about herself she wished to share with other
  people online. But she stopped short at divulging details like her address,
  verifying instead her user names on other Web services like Yahoo's
  photo-sharing site Flickr, which the service also verifies. "I didn't see
  any reason to put my address front and center," says the Web editor.

  The companies stress that they don't store personal information about their
  users. But consumers may still shrink from a service they think knows too
  much about them. "The minute you aggregate identity information you
  aggregate risk," says Jamie Lewis, the chief executive of the Burton Group,
  a Salt Lake City research firm. With hackers out looking for financial
  information, "you create a target," he says.


  --
  -----------------
  R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
  44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
  "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
  [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
  experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'