OII ID Management forum

The Oxford Internet Institute are running an event on ID management next week. Stefan Brands is speaking along with other notables and has produced a short position paper. He notes that governments round the world are interested in online service delivery and cross departmental sharing which require identity management systems. In addition he notes that those systems currently available from the leading industry players would be highly inappropriate for the business of government and managing the identity of citizens. Adopting such - basically centralised - systems on a society wide scale, he says "is not only in conflict with the principles of data protection legislation: it would have unprecedented repercusions for civil liberties and democracy... In the context of identity management, security and privacy are not opposites but mutually reinforcing, asssuming identity technologies are deployed that provide multi-party security."