The Future of Identification

The current trend of Biometric traits in governments issued cards such as e-passports, citizen-id or some employee-id cards like in fips201 will definitely change the Identification landscape. The drop in cost of various biometric technologies appears to make them good candidates for enterprise identification systems as well. The risks for the individuals of identification of unfettered usage of advance identification technologies appear considerable.

Even the privacy friendly initiatives today (cardspace, Higgins) present the end-user with unfair consent requests that he/she might be ill-equipped to answer, with no understanding of the risks behind the consent. Simply put every release of identification information bears certain risks.

Identity is a valuable commodity. In this context it seems important to start looking at strategies minimizing the release of identification information in usage scenarios, with significant usage of managed anonymity on end of the spectrum, possession based ticketing technologies, before we reach use cases requiring the very controlled release of irreplaceable identity traits.