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Liberty Alliance Completes Phase 2
g0_p writes "According to CNET the Liberty Alliance project released its phase 2 specifications for the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework. This will provide the much talked about 'single-sign-on' to multiple websites capability. Websites will be able to securely share information about the user including credit card data. The biggest benefit of sharing this kind of data is for people using web services through handhelds and mobile phones (Lesser buttons to click to buy birthday gift..). This may be significant, since many of the new phone models have web browsing capability and there is a considerable surge in sales. Now that this phase is complete we should start seeing this standard being implemented out there on the web. It would also be interesting to see how it stands up against Microsoft Passport in terms of security which has had troubles in the past."
No initiative is going to work unless someone gets a major credit card company on-board to assume the risk, pure and simple.
Frankly, I don't want "single-sign-on", and I don't get why other people would either. The information I'd want to be available to my bank is completely different from what I'd want to be available to "Jim's Hardware Shack".
Presumably, in order for this to work effectively, if you have one standardized set of information about "you", it would have to be the superset of information you'd need for all the sites you use. And, to be efficient from an implementation standpoint, I'd expect this information will be replicated all over the place in various caching mechanisms. This leaves your information fully available to web site operators reputable, disreputable, secure and hackable alike. As well as likely creating a situation where if your primary "record" is compromised, it could provide enough information to allow access "as you" to *all* the web sites you use. This seems like quite a high price to pay for the need to create a separate login for each site, which realistically, is probably on the order of a dozen or two registered sites a year for most users.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I'd much rather control my own damn info and type the CC # into a lot of individual forms than have sites share my data. (Anyway, this problem is solved by browsers' auto-form-fill and auto-password features.)
sulli
RTFJ.
If Passport doesn't convert to the "Liberty Identity Web Services Framework", I fail to see how this can get wide consumer usage. Remember, people just want to buy stuff online, they don't want to learn about the differences between passport and a services framework. Somehow they're either going to have to persuade MS to use the framework, or make a superior client that's easy to download (maybe make it an ActiveX control?) Of course, the problem is, Passport ships with Windows/IE, so it's going to be more quickly available that any other client.
If you are worried about this then stop clicking "Yes" to the "Do you want mozilla to remember this information" box. Or turn the feature off altogether.
Don't make Mozilla out to be wrong just because you don't know how to read dialogs.
If I would see a car lot called "Honest Al's Used Cars", I'd hold on to my wallet. Honest people don't usually point out their own honesty.
And when bunch of big companies try to figure out easy and effective ways to share information about me, and call it "the liberty alliance", I doubt that liberty is uppermost in their minds.
As everyone has pointed out, no one wants this stuff, and we'd all be better off if it just went away.
When i think of ultimate security of my personal information it doesn't include giving it to some service to remember it for me because i am too lazy to pull out my wallet and type in some numbers. Heck, if i'm going that far I should just get a remote control for my computer so i can hit the amazon.com button on it and then hit the big red BUY! button. Anyway.. back to my point.. I dont trust that people that i don't know will take care of personal information better then i can.
Liberty Alliance is a way for BUSINESSES to establish trust relationships with regards to YOUR personal data. Yep.. trust one vendor, and if he's a friend to another vendor (duh) they get your info as well. Isn't that convenient.
One problem... you can't manage your own certificates!! HA!!
One group was intentionally left out of the Liberty Alliance... us!!
This just a Sun driven organziation whose goal is to make sure their rip-off of Passport succeeds. It may not use a server centric model, but the result is the same. Your information going to people you didn't want it to go to without any means by which you can shut it down.
In all fairness, I haven't seen this v2 thing. Maybe it has some fixes that protect the consumer in some way. When Sun did their presentation on this a year or so ago, EVERY major company in the audience RIPPED them apart with questions regarding the OWNERSHIP of their certificates. This is all about B2B and giving the shaft to the C.
"Privacy and security are fundamental components of the identity issue, and Liberty's work has been developed with this in mind," said Piper Cole, chair of Liberty's Public Policy Expert Group and vice president of global public policy for Sun Microsystems. "Privacy is good for business and Liberty's mission is to provide the technology tools and business guidance to ensure good privacy."
Your privacy is gone with the first trust made to a company YOU don't want to have your information. Until Liberty Alliance specifies a means by which certificates can be controlled, time limited and revoked by the INDIVIDUAL... this is just a Passport wannabe.
And so we continue to move closer to a single identifier per person. You're SS# is used for identity verification with nearly every social and financial service, and now we move closer to being wedded to another identifier. Whether we want it or not, Internet ID is going to move closer to this paradigm as time moves on. Ive seen a lot of flambait regarding 'YES to SSO' or 'DOWN with SSO!'. But this kind of consolidation is the same trend every vital service has moved towards.