Yet another on identity
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:date: 2012-08-08T00:31:05
:category: computer
:tags: identity, OwnCloud, privacy

I am not sure I have written it somewhere here, but I have been
persuaded that identity is the most important and yet unresolvable issue
circling around Internet `since at least 1997`_ (don’t bother to read
the paper, it is pretty poorly written and I didn’t have courage to
state my conclusions clearly). The paper was about legal aspects of
EDI_ (if you know what it is, then you are probably in 0. 00001 % of
population), but during the research I found that whole idea of
Internet-wide EDI is basically dead not because of technological
challenges (they are real, but probably solvable), but because of lack
of universal government-backed legally binding identity system, and such
system will be never be introduced, while `electorate of some
countries`_ opposes any attempt to introduce any `system of IDs`_. Of
course, I don’t want to say that USA is the only country opposing
identity documents, that they don’t have good reasons for their
rejection of IDs, or that REAL ID Act wasn’t horribly mangled (in the
post-9/11 era I wouldn’t expect anything else). Just that without
well-functioning IDs we will never experience **full** potential what
Internet can bring to us.

This experience is probably the reason why I was always skeptical to all
attempts to create Internet based identity systems (mainly OpenID), and
why I stay skeptical when I read `this post by Tim Bray`_. There are
problems which are not technological, but political/social, and such
problems cannot be resolved by improvements in technology, although most
programmers never believe it and will try to develop new and new
technology to solve it. I don’t believe Google will ever introduce any
system of Internet-wide identity which they would be willing to accept
even from other identity providers. Of course, Google (and Facebook,
Twitter, and others) will pretend that OAuth is such system, because it
allows innocent third party website to give up all their most valuable
data to them. But until I will be able to login to GMail with my
identity from Yahoo/Facebook, I won’t believe that Google will be a
honest member of the identity community. Many people on that webpage (me
included) asked Tim about BrowserID_. I am afraid that’s one things he
is not allowed to talk about. When Facebook/Google/Yahoo/AOL/Microsoft
killed by turning their blind eye OpenID, I don’t see any reasons why we
should expect any other attitude towards BrowserID. Which doesn’t mean
that BrowserID is doomed, but that we should expect it to be just
limited tool for independent openweb loving parties.

.. _`since at least 1997`:
    http://matej.ceplovi.cz/clanky/edi-mime.pdf
.. _EDI:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%20Electronic_Data_Interchange
.. _`electorate of some countries`:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document#United_States
.. _`system of IDs`:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act
.. _`this post by Tim Bray`:
    http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/06/29/Becoming-an-Identity-guy
.. _BrowserID:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserID