OAuth, CloudTripper and the IGF
Posted by Bill Gaffney | October 6th, 2007Even with the incidence of identity theft soaring year-over-year according to the Identity Theft Center in San Diego, governments enacting laws that explicitly hold corporations accountable for data losses deemed avoidable, and class-action suits seeing results for those victimized, users are giving up more than the usual to mashup services in exchange for convenience.Recently I blogged about OAuth releasing their final draft specs which allow users to access their private data across sites without sharing their username, password or identity in any capacity. The team appears to have really looked at the other authentication protocols currently employed and built upon them.
Denise Caruso of the New York Times highlights other ideas being developed to both protect our identity and leverage mashups.
The project that Denise finds the most intriguing is called the CloudTripper Project, which is devoted to portability of personal social data.
(CloudTripper empowers) individuals to “take their data with them” as they move across different websites and applications without having it locked into any particular silo. [cloudtripper]
The Identity Governance Framework, also mentioned, “aims to help organizations comply with national and international regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act”.
(The IGF) specifications provide a common framework for defining usage policies, attribute requirements, and developer APIs pertaining to the use of identity related information. These enable businesses to ensure full documentation, control, and auditing regarding the use, storage, and propagation of identity-related data across systems and applications. [oracle]
The bottom line is that every day, whether through naivete, ignorance, or blatant disregard users are offering up their name, address, phone, Social Security and credit-card numbers online. And considering the PR nightmare that TJX has experienced, a standard needs to be adopted to protect both the individual and, in doing so, the liabilities of businesses.
