WRITTEN ON August 11th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, We told you so..., What do we want?

I reckon Drummond Reed over in the US is showing us the way to go in the new Open ID/ICF white paper(Info Card Foundation press release) :

Entitled Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government, the paper explains the approach both foundations are taking to enable open, Internet-scale trust networks using OpenID and Information Cards.
“Open trust frameworks are the way to bridge open identity technologies like OpenID and Information Cards with the trust requirements of large communities such as the U.S. federal government,” said Mr. Reed. “They are a practical solution to enabling government agency websites and applications to accept identities from non-governmental identity providers. This reduces friction and lowers costs while at the same time increasing security and privacy.”

If the Americans adopt this, perhaps that will slip past the Mindguards here, prick the bubble of the trace-like state of groupthink and allow a beginning to an end to any residual idea that the benighted ID Scheme, coupled with organisation-centric data sharing, is the way to provide personalised public services.

As it happens, if the UK government went down the route of an open trust framework, an optional register-only version of the BIDS might have some utility. If users controlled their credentials, they might in certain circumstances choose to invoke an NIR token, for heavily regulated transactions. But mostly they would just use open or web-based IDs from service providers such as Google, Amazon, banks or evil credit-referecing agencies, or purpose-built new services such as Mydex.