That site offers free certificates, where previously people (and companies) had to pay a lot of money.

There are different levels of trust but they do offer to qoute : “verify your identity using your government issued photo identity documents.”

Would this not be similar to what you all were discussing?

I would be interested in your thoughts for this in relation to the above discussion.

However, going back to what Simon reminded me of, trusted third parties could possibly use OpenID to prove identity. This could do this by becoming an OpenID Provider – it’s down to people being able to trust the assertions that are made by companies and/or individuals (as you suggest).

As far as terminology goes – I can live with differentiating between “identity” and “prov(es/ing) identity” – I think in the context of most online services, an “identity” that is tracable to a unique identifier (URI) is sufficient.

I like the term identity – I just don’t like the word ‘proven’ in the context of technology with no verification process. So, for identities that have been proven, how about we use the term ‘verified’, or ‘proven’ – say what it does on the tin so our grannies know what the hell we’re talking about.

I remember when the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Special Interest group first started, I almost had to remind the extremely intelligent technical folk that the group’s mission was ‘marketing’, so we had to stop talking about Semantic Web, RDF and definitely had to stop talking about ontologies. We need to speak in layman’s language using terms they already understand.

Try to figure out what a Web page is according to W3C definition for the sake of Web accessibility? It’s a mind fcuk. The terms are ok to the working groups (I’m including my own staff in there) that dream them up, but give them to agencies and freelance developers who actually design and build Web sites and you get a blank stare.

I still don’t like ‘strong identity’. We can continue to use the word identity, but not say that solution x ‘proves’ identity. That said, I think if the passport office was a provider, we could say that it ‘proved’ identities…

I agree that you shouldn’t be forced to prove who you are all of the time. I’m not in favour of ‘policing the Internet’, which I hope, it obvious from my W3C work.

You don’t necessarily want to prove who you are when creating an account with Bebo (I use them instead of MySpace because it’s European and a friend of mine co-founded it). But you might want eBay and PayPaul to force people to prove who they say they are.