October 03, 2011
Cyberspace trust: Proving you’re not a dog
A very real discomfort underlies the classic joke: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” How can you prove your own identity and confirm the identity of others during virtual interactions? Every time you reach out to a friend on Gchat, post on a classmate’s Facebook wall, or send money to a colleague via PayPal, you are relying on a key assumption: that the person you’re reaching out to behind that Gmail address, Facebook profile, or PayPal screen name is who they say they are. Without this baseline confidence, online interactions and commerce would be paralyzed.
http://portalsandrails.frbatlanta.org/2011/10/cyberspace-trust-proving-youre-not-dog.html
Philip thinks:
- The next step is to merge the identity sought by everyone and easily relegated to the Banks to manage. Facebook and GMail offer an option if their KYC can be improved. With face to face meeting it is possible to truly prove identity, requiring a branch network.
- Transaction processing is legacy in the developed world while the emerging economies offer an opportunity to build new. Existing standards and processes need to be respected as they transform to absorb the new information attachments and Internet offers we now need to cope with.
- The Wallet forms the basic unit to create a trusted network employing smart cards, trusted computing, persistent computing and inteligence to enable the consumer experience.
- Privacy and integrity of that trust is essential to the system
- The individual is key
- Respect rights and obligations