Technology A-Lister’s Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and PayPal, plus nine leaders in the technology community, announced the formation of a non-profit foundation, The Information Card Foundation, to promote simpler, more secure, and open digital identity management on the Internet.
Tech giants work together to improve online ID management
Information Cards take a familiar behavior – using a card to prove your identity and provide information – and brings it online. The ICF explains that Information Cards are a visual representation of a personal digital identity. They can be shared with online entities and consumers are able to manage the information in their cards, have multiple cards with different levels of detail, and easily select the card they want to use for any given interaction.
“Rather than logging into web sites with usernames and passwords, Information Cards let people ‘click-in’ using a secure digital identity that carries only the specific information needed to enable a transaction,” said Charles Andres, executive director for the Information Card Foundation. “Additionally, businesses will enjoy lower fraud rates, higher affinity with customers, lower risk, and more timely information about their customers and business partners.”
The founding members of the Information Card Foundation reads like a who's who of financial and information management as well as high scale technology, a geeks A-Team if you will. Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and PayPal, are founding members of the ICF Board of Directors. Individuals also serving on the board include ICF Chairman Paul Trevithick of Parity, Patrick Harding of Ping Identity, Mary Ruddy of Meristic, Ben Laurie, Andrew Hodgkinson of Novell, Drummond Reed, Pamela Dingle of the Pamela Project, Axel Nennker, and Kim Cameron of Microsoft.
The ICF will support and guide efforts to enable the development of an open and interoperable identity layer that maximizes control over personal information by individuals. To do so, the Information Card infrastructure will use new and current exchange and security protocols, standards and software components. They also hope that businesses and organizations that supply or consume personal information will see the benefit of joining forces and using the process.
The idea the ICF has is solid, and based on great ideas. However, there is no guess as to how well it will go over online. OpenID is a great idea too, but many of the mainstream sites are just now starting to accept it, and even still the numbers of sites that use it are small.
More information online:http://informationcard.net/
Interested in a more interactive TTH? Join our Facebook Group Want regular updates from The Tech Herald? Follow us on Twitter
Advertising
Comment on this Story