I talked to my Sensei-san, Dr. Kpatcha Bayarou of Fraunhofer SIT, recently and allthough only having a few minutes, we came to some extreme views on what User Centric IAM really was about.
Power!
The power to control who gets access to what of my content and information! You are reading this text without disclosing anything about yourself, which is due to my totally hedonistic way of "sharing the knowledge" ;-) . Ok, one might say it is to lure some of you into registering for this site, for our newsletters and even some of the reports. That is, to get YOUR IDENTITY and YOUR MONEY ;-) Do you get a feeling where this will go?
Until recently, anybody who had something to offer on the internet (or elsewhere in the brick&mortar world) would request your registration to do business with you. This was tedious, had lots of flaws and still puts a lot of burden on us consumers, especially the ones with the infamous "Geiz ist geil" attitude, always hunting for the best price of a merchandise. These bargain hunters would willingly subscribe anywhere and register with any online-shop where they would be able to buy something marginally cheaper of get their hands on a shiny new gagdet first. Well, we all did this sometime, somewhere, didn't we? It may even have been just to get a special software that we would need to get something done quickly...
There the bargain hunters end up with a multitude of logins and passwords, as if we had known it. The background is the same everywhere: somebody who has something we want won't let us have it until we sacrifice/disclose some of our identity information. Actually these people have power over us, and they are executing it freely. We seem to ignore this fact, as we are so much used to "register for free...". This is seldomly "free", we pay with facettes of our identity, and those are valuable to me.