WRITTEN ON June 30th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?

Philip Virgo likes the new IPS policy which is called Safeguarding your identity. I’m not so sure:

Philip: It’s late and I havent read it carefully. But the whole statement is built on the assumption that goverment should be our identity provider for online services.

But I think there’s a strong case to be made that it should not. It concentrates too much power.

Our personal data is our own, and it’s valuable. We dont want it to become concentrated in government, out of our control.

We want a competitive market in user-friendly and flexible online identity provision services. This policy is about coercion, not choice. It says its about empowerment, but it’s not.

Far better to say:

“People need to access stuff online, including government services. Therefore we’re announcing that from today we’ll accept a range of independent identifiers for all our various services. But if you want a sensitive service it’ll need to be a secure one.

“As new ID services become available we’ll be happy to add them to the list of accredited services.”