Identity Uniqueness Problem - Can openid solve it?

[Matthew Weymar]

On 9/20/06, Drummond Reed <drummond.reed at cordance.net> wrote:
>
> (Note that those
> simple, human-friendly names you assign to them still need to be unique --
> from your perspective -- or else you won't be able to distinguish between
> them yourself.)


Easy for you to say, Drummond! smile, but I have more than one friend named,
"John." This opens the door to all kinds of confusion, like when I'm talking
to my wife about our friend "John" - assuming (often stupidly) that she
knows which "John" - and she is assuming it's some other "John" I'm talking
about.

I.e., we don't actually insist on uniqueness among "those simple,
human-friendly names" we assign to people. Sometimes we can distinguish
among them anyway - by context; and sometimes we can't.

It's another example of how making things really, really simple for the end-
> user is really, really hard.


Indeed!

Good luck with your work!
Matthew

But someone's got to do it ;-)
>
> =Drummond (i-name: =drummond.reed, http://xri.net/=drummond.reed)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: general-bounces at openid.net [mailto:general-bounces at openid.net] On
> Behalf Of John Kemp
> Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 5:52 AM
> To: 백주성
> Cc: general at openid.net
> Subject: Re: Identity Uniqueness Problem - Can openid solve it?
>
> 백주성 wrote:
> > Identity Uniqueness Problem
>
> Note ^^^^^ /identity/ Uniqueness problem. There's a difference between
> an identifier, a unique identifier, and an identity ( basically a
> collection of identifiers)!
>
> >
> > I think that
> >
> > Identifier should be one which he/she really want.
> >
> > Identifier can be modified as his/her wish.
> >
> > Identifier should not be unique.
>
> An identifier is something that identifies you. In other words, it puts
> you in a set (potentially a set containing only one element if it is a
> unique identifier for you) of those identified by that identifier.
>
> An identity consists of some attributes about you. Those attributes ae
> often identifiers. My name "John" is an identifier. If you said "create
> a set of all people called John", I'd be in that set. In other words, I
> am identified by that identifier.
>
> John is, of course, not a unique identifier.
>
> Many companies assign /unique/ identifiers to an individual. Such an
> identifier has the purpose of uniquely identifying a single individual
> (or thing).
>
> Imagine that you have a bank account - if someone needed to put money
> into that bank account, they'd want to ensure it was the bank account of
> the single entity that they wished to pay. It would be pretty bad if
> they couldn't uniquely identify the bank account!
>
> So, there's some services that need to uniquely identify an individual
> (ie. banking, government etc.) There are some services that provide
> better service by uniquely (or partially) identifying an individual. If
> a service knows it's you, uniquely, it can customize its service (what
> are your preferences for news content - likely not the same as mine?)
> And then there are also many services that need only /partially/
> identify you (your post code is an identifier for you, in that you would
> fit into the set of all people who live in that postal area, and could
> be used to give you the weather report for your post code).
>
> OpenID seems to be focused on the use-cases for uniquely identifying an
> individual.
>
> And in my opinion, I don't think a /user/ should ever need to know his
> or her unique identifier assigned by some identity provider and used at
> same service provider.
>
> - John
> >
> >
> >
> > How do you think about that?
> >
> >
> >
> >
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