The Laws Of Identity

Kim Cameron of Microsoft has written a fascinating piece on ‘The Laws of Identity’. Kim lays out an initial 6 laws (sample: ‘1. The Law of Control: Technical identity systems MUST only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent’) and explores a scenario (originally suggested by Eric Norlin from Ping Identity) where a Polycom conference phone requests your music preferences from your Bluetooth phone. As Eric points out, this is technically possible via the Liberty specifications.

I just discovered Kim’s blog, so I need to do a bit of reading before commenting much more, but, for now, I’ll just point out that Liberty WSF’s interaction service provides the mechanism by which your phone would beep and request your consent before handing over personal data to the Polycom, thus obeying Kim’s first law.