Interview on Digital Identity and the Personal InfoCloud

Oct 21, 2005

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Thomas Vander Wal

Today Thomas Vander Wal appears in Under the Radar: That cloud kinda looks like you! in an interview with Scott Hirsch who is a partner at MIG5. The interview focusses on digital identity, which is integral to the Personal InfoCloud and interacting with other people and services in the digital world. Increasingly it seems digital identity is tethered to physical world identity for access to buildings, accessing our computers, medical services, etc. This has some problems around privacy that must be addressed and there must be trust in the services that interact with out digital identity.

2 responses to “Interview on Digital Identity and the Personal InfoCloud”

personalinfocloud.com@vanhecke.info

22 October 2005

From the interview:

“But in Belgium, they have adopted national identity cards with medical information and police information–who has access to it is selectively restricted.”

That is not really true. The identitity card itself is just a token of identification: it does NOT contain medical or police records. Governmental institutions and public and private organisations can however use the ID card to identify their customers or employees – basically it is a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) that’s been set up by national government so companies or local government don’t have to do this by themselves.

“There are models where you can have this data aggregated and people still trust the system. But even the Belgians refused to have this information aggregated online where it’s potentially retrievable.”

Indeed! As a private company or public service you need to store information on your customers in a database. Although you can ask your customers to identify themselves with their eID (by using the private key stored on a card + a pin code to be able to access it), it is forbidden by law to store the “National Identification Number” (Rijksregisternr in Dutch), because of the fear that information contained in several databases could be aggregated (e.g. after data theft, company merger, sale of data, etc…)