Identity Mash-up conf
I’ve been in Boston since Monday (leaving tonight) attending the Identity Mash-up conference. While the conference is mostly academic in nature I find the discussions about centralizing identity systems fascinating. Today I had to speak up since someone from the DOJ started talking about a national ID system, others have been talking about intergrating your credit cards into a single centralized card. So I spoke about my experience auditing Japan’s national ID system and all of the problems I discovered with their system and I asked two simple question, are you familiar with these problems and have you prepared for them? The panel went silent. Scary.
The US and American companies are thinking about how cool a homogeneous database with everyones verified info would be and all the benefits that come from it but not enough people are thinking about the dangers of such databases. What would the social security system look like if we took into consideration identity fraud before building it?
June 21st, 2006 at 2:45 am
centralizing in this “era of decentralizing” seems a joke…
June 21st, 2006 at 8:13 am
oooh, good to hear that. actually I wanted to attend that conf if my sched was allowing me to do so but obviously I stuck in Tokyo this week. I always wonder why so many think centralizing DB and centralized ID card system in any sort is a good idea….it’s just creating another single point of failure. they should learn from the design failure (yes, it was) of SSN. obviously Japanese gov didn’t learn much previously to start the system. they asked us for a research about such topics ‘after’ they started the system.
June 22nd, 2006 at 2:51 am
I’m totally against any type of huge central system of numbering and identifying people.