[OpenID] owning one's own identity

[Peter Williams]

In other words, by embracing OpenID (and InfoCard), the government is helping to further establish the value of owning one's own identity, and of having convenient, consistent, and privacy-protecting mechanisms in place to enhance and enable participation. [http://openid.net/2009/09/09/open-identity-for-the-government/]

>From what one can tell from reports about the current profile, the government is doing the exact opposite of "helping to further establish the value of owning one's own identity". It is specifically requiring that your identity is managed (and legally owned) by certain (large) players. If PayPal decides today to revoke access to my PayPal account, I cannot access my .gov resources with the same identity I used yesterday - as the identity signals are the property of - and under the exclusive control of -  PayPal, not me.

We seem to be heading back to the days when AT&T has total power of whether you could or could not keep your phone number, if you switched carrier.

Why repeat the error?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-general/attachments/20090909/0fbe265b/attachment-0001.htm>