White Label Identity and the Identity Escrow

The reason we got interested in VRM initially was a project we were working on awhile ago which we called "white label Identity" - we were getting increasingly worried about just how much the search engines and consumer sites were able to glean from your digital footprint.

The idea was to have a service that knew who you were, so it could authenticate you, and it then represented you - and many others - in your cruisn round the web. So Google et al don't see you, Jo/e Sixpack, with your surfing history and credit card number, but instead see an aggregated identity doing many different things, and when you want to spend money the White Label just says "yup, I'm up for that - charge it"

Anyway, I was reminded of that when I read this paper on "Identity Escrow" - its a much catchier term for what we were looking at (the skill with many of these "old wine" ideas is the correct labelling of the new bottle methinks

Now, at the time, when we tested the idea the two things that came back instantly were:

(i) A lot of people would immediately want to be very certain it wasn't being used for money laundering etc, so the entity running it would probably have to be fairly well regulated to be trusted (or set up in the Cayman Islands - hmmmm...). In Europe anyway, national Telcos emerged as trusted parties for this service, banks at a push, HM Gov (before the disks fiasco), but certainly not dodgy startups.

(ii) At the time (c 3 years ago) the rank and file out there couldn't give a toss about security anyway and wouldn't pay tuppence ha'penny for it - and to be honest, looking at the collective "So?" that has greeted the revelations about Facebook Beacon etc, I'm not sure its much better now

Anyway, we wrote the report, took the money, and went off to fields anew - However, I do note that towards the end of last year and since, there have been increasing rumblings, and the emergence of stuff like VRM makes me think this is an area whose time is coming.