Private Personal Agents vs. Microsoft's Passport

stefaanh asks: "With the recent MS Passport concerns, I remembered an 'IEEE Expert' 'JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1997 article called 'Managing your privacy in an on-line world' written by Michael McCandless. It talks about why you would hand out private information (on the Net), and proposes a personal agent that manages your info, in a way that you control, what, who and when to give out a selection of your sensitive data. Who benefits: you, and the companies that don't pay for outdated or inaccurate data anymore, but [pay you] for accessing correct data. Since I consider Passports 'security' not as serious as the potential of consumer tracking, what sits in the way for this personal agent to challenge the threat of Passport's centralized approach? Isn't the time right for such an implementation?"

Comments

The ultimate personal agent

[Invisible Agent]

a personal agent that manages your info, in a way that you control, what, who and when to give out a selection of your sensitive data.

Boy, I think I already have one of these. It's called my brain, and when a web site asks me for personal information, I consult with my brain to see if I want to give it to them. Then, I use another technology called my 'keyboard', and type in the relevant data. It takes about 30 seconds usually, and it has none of the potential vulnerabilities that come from entrusting my data to some 3rd party.

Are people really this lazy, or am I missing something?

Re:ugh

[Lonath]

Fortunately, I am working on a free replacement to Passport. It's called GMOTB (GNU Mark of the Beast). All versions will be version 6.66. The software is free (as in beer) and free (as in speech), except you will have to give us an irrevocable perpetual non-exclusive license to your soul. We will not have to safeguard your soul or keep it private, and we can cross-sell souls with some of the other companies with businesses in this same IP space (such as the Christians and Muslims). Even though they don't like us very much. We are protecting our IP space from thieves like open source advocates by enforcing our patents in several key areas including "A Method and Apparatus for Parallel Achievement of Salvation", and "An Apparatus for Storing Large Numbers of 1's and 0's and Changing them Periodically to New Arrangements Based on their Current Arrangements to Create Mathematical Models of Real-World Phenomena". Needless to say, although Bill Gates has been one of our strategic partners for a long time, we feel it is important enough to win in this market segment that we have struck out on our own to give consumers true choice.