Everyone is talking about OpenID and Internet Identity is the same vein – not sure about that. Internet Identity is a heck a lot more then your username and password. It is your name, your address, what you like, how you look like, what you do ?
Are you the same person that is called (insert openid name) on this website and (insert openid name) on that website ?
What OpenID provides is a common username/password base that you as a user controls. You can change the password one time and it changed everywhere. You can change the username and it changed everywhere.
*Still*, you see that as you go to these OpenID-enabled websites, although you get to login with your OpenID, all of them want to capture your true identity information for their own databases: your name, your email address, your address, your title…etc. — So they can spam me later ? and sell me information ?
OpenID is not going to solve that problem. It is not designed to solve that problem.
I-names, on the other hand, will go a bit farther. You setup universal URIs and give them out.
- email: xri.net/=name/(+email)
- blog: xri.net/=name/(+blog)
- chat: xri.net/=name/(+chat)
- hobby1: xri.net/=name/(+hobby1)
You can change then when you want to, to what you want.
I-names should also come with profiles. My default profile would be filled up “internet-ready” identity information. However, if I want to use the i-name for my banks, I would want to give (or they require) some of my real info – in which case, I need to setup a different profile ? (may be the user-defined tags in XRI will come to my rescue..)
XRI and XDI does want the i-names to become universal and even get accepted by banks etc, right ?
“Internet Identity is a heck a lot more then your username and password.”
You’ve concisely expressed what some friends and I have been discussing and brainstorming about for the past six months. OpenID does not provide a truly ubiquitous digital identity — it merely lays the groundwork by providing universal authentication, a small but important part. We’ve developed a potential solution to the problem. Shoot me an email if you’re interested in hearing about what we’ve come up with.
[...] OpenID is solving what *I* want out of it, in relation to Internet Identity. As I said earlier, “Internet Identity is a heck a lot more then your username and password“. The front page of OpenID website says this about OpenID: OpenID is a free and easy way to [...]