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You can put your faith in NDS if you want to try this. Novell calls it digitalme, and being Novell they've never actually let the world know they've created this.

From their online propaganda:

The interactive nature of the Internet enables e-businesses to gather information about consumers in unprecedented amounts. While many e-businesses maintain privacy policies -- and post them for users to see -- the fact that this personal information is being collected and shared without the knowledge and permission of the consumer has some individuals and advocacy groups calling for government intervention.

Novell's digitalme is the first major effort by a large, multi-national corporation to give consumers the ability to control their personal information and manage their online relationships. With digitalme, management of online relationships is put firmly in the control of the user.

We call this new orientation toward consumer empowerment, meBusiness, and it ushers in a revolutionary new age of commerce on the Internet. A world where every person is empowered to manage their relationships with individuals and businesses by controlling how their personal information is shared, used and maintained on the Net. A world where every e-business is systematically enabled to responsibly use, and on request, purge customer information. All of which is designed to lead to less intrusive marketing, more trust in online relationships, respect for personal privacy and greater acceptance of e-commerce as a viable alternative to brick and mortar retailing.

When this thing launched I seem to recall Novell positioning it as a universal login to websites through online authentication. Now that seems to be dropped and a simple keychain function used instead. Whatever the case it's all built on Novell's awesome NDS (called "eDirectory" this week) technology which gives it some street-cred. NDS is the most mature directory service out there and scales awesomely, very flexible and at this point pretty mature. MS's projects are, well lets just say "quality is a journey" at MS and with Sun, well Jini sure is nifty!

Anyway, an interesting third example of this increasingly debated service.

Novell's DigitalMe is something like this. You decide which bits of information other DigitalMe accounts have access to. It has an interface which will log you into all your web site accounts. The only problem is allowing a corporate entity control over the database. Thanks to Novell's distributed Directory Service, it is theoretically possible for a user to choose a trusted entity to host the information.

Novell is attempting to build something similar to this, check it out at: www.digitalme.com

he solution is to use tools that interoperate and enable you to manage multiple accounts, security, identity and authentication informations.
Novell provides Single Sign On to login to accounts on different systems and applications through the network. Another solution-enabler, for the Internet, is Digitalme. It stores your online identity information and helps you manage your accounts (the e-card is a particularly pretty thingy IMHO). LDAP is another element of the puzzle, and Novell Directory Services knits them all together.
And I almost forgot to mention; a year ago I tried some Java beans and VB ActiveX controls that connected to NDS, and I could, therefore, create NDS-aware applications. You could, for example, make a simple application that would tell you the number of servers and users in a certain organisational unit. OK, and I am pretty nostalgic because I'm working on totally different projects now, so I kinda miss the neat Novell technology....

I've just come away from giving a presentation about web tracking.

It's difficult to weigh up the benefits and disadvantages for the companies and the users - on the one hand companies can really improve their site (layout, usability, quality of information) based on that information. Being able to track people across multiple sites will be enable companies to really cater for those that are coming to their site.

However, users, understandably, don't want every move of theirs tracked - presumably with the worry that they will in the end, be held accountable for that time they typed in www.pr0n4u.com.

Balancing the wants of the company and of the individual is always difficult. In the end, is the individual willing to pay the price of less privacy for a 'better' (i.e. targetted to get the most visits/$$'s from you) browsing experience? Without these measures are unscrupulous people going to join your browsing records with your browsing information?

This area is going to get very complex, legislative-wise, with products such as Novell's DigitalMe campaign to store user profiles 'for your convenience'. This is put forward as a great enabler, but in fact mostly, it is an enabler for companies to get information about you, or aggregate information about you and others, and helps you very little.

With the introduction of the W3C's P3P platform, it will be easier for users to keep track of where their personal details are going, but this kind of collaborative tracking really is a bit difficult. Obviously, DoubleClick will have a privacy policy. When they change it in the case of legislation, will they chuck away your data?

thenerd
The camels are coming.

Novell has a similar technology called DigitalMe. It does not carry 'e-cash', but allows you to enter any information in any site. I haven't tried using credit card information with it, but I'm sure it would work. Much more secure (and interesting) than the Microsoft offering.

Novell made an announcement about digitalme (http://www.digitalme.com) about a week before the Microsoft announcement. Digitalme seems similar, except it's not demanding your billing information, and it's designed to let you control what parts of yourself you want to share with whom. And it's using their directory services to do it. I have no idea what Microsoft's backend is. Overall, Novell's concept seems less creepy.

Novell's also talking about freely releasing some of the digitalme tools--of course, you'll need Novell stuff to do it, but it's a start...