by Ron Daly
When you work in online services, issues of trust and reliability are on the forefront of any discussion you have about your product and how it will be perceived by users. E-mail marketing, for example, suffers from the perception that messages sent won't make it to the inbox. DigitalMailer's spent nine years getting white listed by the largest ISPs in the world, so we can answer most critics with a high rate of delivery and a set of standards and best practices that keep words like SPAM out of our vocabulary.
Ebay, Amazon, Netflix, - they all had to take into account that they'd be doing business behind a curtain. When you buy from someone online, whether they're the vendor or they're acting as a middle-man, they would need to establish privacy regulations and a level of dependability in their services.
What if the system worked both ways?
According to this article in the New York Times,
Equifax wants to make an online ID that tells websites who you are, and whether or not
you're dependable (
click here).
I see this from two sides. One, it's a great idea. When you're selling something that might be age restricted or selling something that will be paid for with some form of credit card, the more information you have about the payer the better.
From the article:
Whether the broader Information Card effort has any chance of taking off is a topic for another day. Information Card is far more complex, and thus harder to use, than Open ID, a standard that lets you use your name and password from one site, say Google, to sign onto another site, for example, Facebook. But that complexity enables some extra features and possible protection against fraud.
Equifax is on to something. There are times when you want someone you are dealing with online to know you really are you. Amazon’s product reviews became more trustworthy when the company started identifying those written by people whose names were validated by way of their credit card accounts.
Adding a new level of trust and dependability to the buyer is an interesting concept. But, as I said, I see the innovation from two sides - with an online ID that contains credit card and website login information, security concerns ring out in my brain. How strong is Equifax's database? Will innovations like this be a honey trap for hackers who want the most information they can get from a single hack? Maybe it's just because I'm a little gun-shy from the Heartland Hack (read about it here and on CUSoapbox.com).
We'll keep an eye on all this for you. Keep reading.
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