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Digital Identity Forum

Observations and reflections about the link between physical identity and virtual identity.

[Dave Birch] Just a quick reminder about the Digital Identity Forum's joint seminar with EEMA at the British Computer Society in London on January 29th. This seminar, sponsored by Consult Hyperion, will be looking at the business opportunities that might arise from the introduction of the UK national identity card. You can register for the seminar at the EEMA web site. The event will be chaired by John Elliott of Consult Hyperion, who has considerable international experience of designing national ID card schemes. With speakers and panelists including

Meg Hillier, the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Identity.
Martin Linda, Siemens PLC.
Frank Layman, Federal Civil Service Information and Communication Technology department, Belgium.
Andy Smith, Identity and Passport Service.
David Blanco, Tractis, Spain.
Colin Whittaker, APACS.
Me.

it should be a useful day out and will hopefully lead to some genuine innovation. Whatever your opinions about ID cards -- and I've made mine plain -- the fact is that the first ones have already been issued. Since the UK scheme is now here, it makes sense for business to look at the opportunities that have arisen around ID cards in other markets, for both online and offline use, in the public and private sectors.

Enabling legislation for the British national

Tomi AhonenJanuary 5

[Dave Birch] Tomi Ahonen is an author and independent consultant, well-known as a speaker in the converging areas of mobile telecoms, internet, media, advertising, credit and banking, and virtual reality, based in Hong Kong. A firm believer in digital communities and social networking, Tomi lectures on all of these topics at Oxford University for which he has developed the short courses for 3G services, 3G business, and mobile-TV. In this podcast [available in podcast MP4 or audio-only MP3 formats], he explains why the mobile is so distinct a channel and talks about digital footprints and co-created identity.

You can download this and other podcasts in both iPod (MP4) and MP3 format from the Consult Hyperion podcast page, where you can also subscribe to the podcast RSS feed. If you have iTunes, you can find the podcasts in the iTunes Store: just search for "Consult Hyperion" in the podcasts area and you can click and subscribe. Alternatively, you can click on this iTunes link.

It's always, always the sameDecember 22 2008

[Dave Birch] One of the reasons why a digital identity infrastructure ought to be more than just building a big database of everyone and then letting everyone have access to it is that the infrastructure will inevitably be abused by those on the inside, no matter how much effort goes into keeping out the bad guys on the outside.

Missouri Citibank employee Brandon Wyatt... accused of tapping Citibank's computers for customer information, then using it to set up checking accounts online with competing banks, including Bank of America, Washington Mutual and AmTrust. Wyatt allegedly wire transferred customer funds from Citibank to the new accounts, then cashed them out with additional transfers, checks, debit card purchases and ATM withdrawals. His take, according to federal prosecutors in St. Louis, was at least $380,000.
[From

Fed Blotter: Citibank Worker Allegedly Plunders Customer Accounts | Threat Level from Wired.com]

It's hard to see how you can stop this from happening completely in an economic way, but what you can do is make sure that there is an audit trail so that someone how decides to have a go at this kind of fraud has a reasonable expectation of being caught. Although I have to say that armed bank robbers have a reasonable expectation of being caught (and a reasonable ex

That'll do nicelyDecember 19 2008

[Dave Birch] Some time ago, I pointed out that aggressive retailers might use ID cards to cut payment schemes out of the transaction loop, by using ID cards as payment tokens and using the ACH network rather than Visa or MasterCard and I subsequently wrote a piece on this for Electronic Finance & Payments Law & Policy. Having been thinking about this and other implications of the introduction of a national ID card scheme, I was surprised to hear from a bank that I was talking to that they had no strategy on the UK ID card (despite the fact that the first cards have already been issued) and no plans to develop a strategy. Now, on the one hand this is understandable, since the UK cards don't do much and there are no readers for them anyway, but on the other hand it may be unwise if other people are developing strategies that may impact banking.

As I have long been advising our clients in the payment space, there will be inevitable implications for retail payments businesses once a national ID card is in place.
[From

Digital Identity Forum: Paying for identity]

Retailers want business change, not just lower fees,

Vote "no" to yesterday's technologyDecember 16 2008

[Dave Birch] The recent Pew report on the Future of the Internet makes the same point that I have been droning on about for ages. Looking at PCs and the web doesn't tell you anything about the future, because the future is mobile.

“Clearly, in the long run, mobile wins,” says Consult Hyperion’s Birch. “For most people, in most of the world, most of the time, the mobile phone is the most important device.”
[From

FST]

Now, in some advanced countries, it is seen as natural to being to transfer applications that hinge on identity over to the most personal interweb interface, the mobile phone. An interesting case study is Estonia. We've looked before at Estonia's use of new technology and they are back at the forefront this month:

Lawmakers approved a measure Thursday allowing citizens to vote by mobile phone in the next parliamentary elections in 2011... The mobile-voting system, which has already been tested, requires that voters obtain free, authorized chips for their phones, said Raul Kaidro, spokesman of the SK Certification Center, which