The search for Identity 2.0

 

Everyone thought Canadian web visionary Dick Hardt was joking when he said he had over a thousand slides in his presentation.

He wasn't. And over the space of 45 minutes Hardt's audience at a digital identity conference held in Wellington's Te Papa Museum on Tuesday was bombarded with countless images and words, many of them repeated at relentless pace.

There were elephants and monkeys, images of George Bush and Dick Cheney and a weird map of North America titled United States of Canada, which pretty much took up the entire continent.

I was painfully close to the front for all this multicolour action, but the show achieved the desired effect. Hardt, a serial entrepreneur active in the open source software community and who invested in the popular Flickr photo sharing website, thinks our digital lives are too complicated.

We have too many passwords to too many online services and most of them are incompatible with each other. Government services are kept separate from everyday web services which have nothing to do with online banking.

"You end up needing this huge maze of logins to make stuff happen," says Hardt.

Worst of all, the information belongs to the owners of the web services we belong to. By and large, we can't take that information with us and use it elsewhere.

Most internet users will be able to relate to this. I have at least 30 internet logins most of which are slightly different variations of the same password. But I'm forever having to get my password emailed to me or reset just so I can update my blog, pay a bill online or post some photos on Flickr, the service from which Hardt surely made a tidy packet when it was sold to Yahoo.

Hardt's solution to all of this digital chaos, as encapsulated in his legendary presentation first given in 2005, is what he calls Identity 2.0.

Hardt says most websites are currently "all about records". Your verified digital identity isn't what you give to the website, but what the website builds up about you through the information you fill out in electronic forms and your online activity. That's Identity 1.0 if you like.

Identity 2.0 involves a new way of doing things where your online identity and the digital baggage that goes with you, follows you around the web.

The idea ties in closely with the OpenID movement which Hardt is involved in. OpenID  allows web users to register with an OpenID provider and then use one identifier to log in to any website that supports OpenID.

Instead of punching in your username and password, you enter a unique identifier, sort of like your personal URL. That identifier is then checked with the identity provider which gave you the OpenID identifier in the first place. Then you're prompted to confirm who you are by either entering a password or an Infocard.

The system is decentralised, reducing the risk of all your web services being exploited if someone hacks into OpenID.

In effect the Identity 2.0 movement puts an authentication agent between the web user and the service they are trying to access sort of like what happens in the real world with passports and drivers' licences.

All sorts of organisations require photo ID to verify your identity, but the Government as a trusted entity issues these identity cards, not the organisations themselves. Hardt sees that system being brought into the online environment cutting out the headaches of having to maintain and remember numerous login details, but also allowing the user to decide how much information they want to give away.

Hardt's own company Sxip is already active in this space with the free Sxipper browser plugin that manages all your passwords stored securely on your computer to automatically fill internet forms for you. It's also compatible with OpenID.

Hardt is the fist to admit OpenID's latest incarnation, Open ID 2.0 isn't perfect. "It's a bit of a Frankenstein architecture." he said.

And in a report card on progress of Identity 2.0 he gives the major players involved some pretty average marks. It's a big job to change the way identity is authenticated on the web. But OpenID is gaining traction, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all supporters of it.

Hardt's presentation is highly entertaining and enlightening so you should definitely check it out.