[OpenID] Laws of id, openid with ssl

[Drummond Reed]

> > Martin Atkins wrote:
> On Jan 26, 2008 4:15 AM, Martin Atkins <mart at degeneration.co.uk> wrote:
> > A subtle difference, but one I think might end up being a point of
> > confusion for other people too. 

Yes, good point, Martin.

> > "Ofuscated" is, in retrospect, probably
> > too "geeky" a word to use in public for this, but perhaps "anonymous"
> > would work? The goal is to avoid people knowing who you are, so
> > anonymous seems like a reasonable term for it.

See below.

> Josh Hoyt wrote:
> I think that anonymous has different problems. Each time you visit a
> site, you're sending the same identifier as last time (otherwise,
> there's no point in having an identifier at all), so you're not really
> getting anonymity, you're really getting pseudonymity [1]. I think
> that people are comfortable enough with the concept of a pseudonym,
> and it's not a technical term.

+1 to "pseudonym" for the reasons Josh mentions. This is how I would put it
in plain English when describing it to a non-technical friend:

"With OpenID 2.0, you can login to a website using your own a public OpenID
identifier -- from which anyone could find out more information about you on
the public Internet -- or you can login with the identifier of your OpenID
provider, who can then generate for you a private OpenID pseudonym that will
only be used with that one site. With an OpenID pseudonym, the site will
always know it's you when you come back, but it won't be able to look up any
other information about you, or correlate your profile with other sites."

=Drummond