Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Brands on building privacy into ID cards

Stefan Brands has emailed William Heath about his posing of the question by government officials about why a single universal identity is a bad idea. Brands is one of the key people the UK government should be talking to regarding identity architectures, since he is one of the few with a really deep understanding of them.

"The envisioned national ID card would replace today’s local non-electronic identifiers by universal identifiers that are processed fully electronically. This migration would remove the natural segmentation of traditional activity domains. As a consequence, the damage that identity thieves can cause would no longer be confined to narrow domains, nor would identity thieves be impaired any longer by the inherent slowdowns of today’s non-electronic identification infrastructure. Furthermore, service providers and other parties would be able to electronically profile individuals across all activity domains on the basis of the universal electronic identifiers that would inescapably be disclosed whenever individuals interact with service providers."

No comments: