CIWG Participant Survey on Consumer Identity Topics of Interest

Following the October 20 2009 conference call, which was attended by 4 WG participants, it was decided to individually survey the remaining 22 participants (at the time) to assess the interests of each participant regarding consumer identity topics.  Of these 22 participants, email responses were received from 7 participants.  These responses were combined with the viewpoints of the 4 participants as stated on the October 20 conference call.  The topics of interest to these 11 participants are as follows.  Each bullet point represents a topic of interest to at least one of these 11 WG participants.  

• Identity as it relates to mobile telecom subscribers, including use of subscriber information contained in mobile devices.

• Interest in, and adoption of, smart cards by consumers, including smart card technology on various form factors such as mobile devices, USB dongles, and plastic cards.

• Privacy aspects of consumer identity, such as evaluating the risks to consumers when various items of personal data are breached.

• Strong authentication of consumers.

• US Government's Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) initiative, including OpenID and Information Cards.

• SAML 2.0, including Authentication Context, and its potential for use in consumer identity implementations.

• Build a reference implementation of a federation to support both patients and health care workers.   

• Interested in Identity Management and Credentialing Services or Identity Service Providers. 
  • Free enrollment at Level 4 Authentication by all Providers. 
  • Consumer education on need and use of hard token authentication and how to evaluate IdSP. 
  • Digital Certificates and hard tokens that are built on BE as the method of Consumer Authentication. 
  • Emphasize the term Consumer Authentication over Consumer Identity as identity is a nebulous concept that can’t be defined.
  • As digital profiles are established for every person above a certain age, it would not matter what one's name is, all that would matter is that you've been located and uniquely authenticated. 

• Explore the possibility of authoring a series of whitepapers that do the following: Define the term "Consumer Identity" as it relates to other aspects of identity (e.g. employee, citizen, etc.) Explore the privacy implications of a Consumer Identity in that context. Catalog the various technical and policy issues that come into play in the protection of the privacy of a Consumer Identity.

• My interest in Consumer Identity has much less to do with security & privacy and much more to do with personalization, customization and enriching the cyber-experience for those consumers.

• I think the issue that really needs to be covered is what makes a consumer identity compelling to both the consumer and the other stake holders and how a business case can be derived from it that supports transactions that might have anything more than trivial value (eg logging onto a blog).