Who decides your online identity?

Many people have multiples IDs online

Technology analyst Bill Thompson wants an online identity he can trust, which is not controlled by one company.

Unless you are the sort of net addict who scours the techie websites, you probably have not come across the Liberty Alliance.

No, it is not a bunch of neo-conservatives campaigning for the replacement of all forms of elected government by the free market and compulsory carrying of guns by all citizens.

It is a consortium of computer companies working to develop a standard for enabling net users to sign on only once when they use the web.

Response to Passport

The BBC doesn't have to know that my name is Bill Thompson to give me tailored news, they just need to know that I'm a 40-something UK resident who likes technology

Bill Thompson

This may sound boring, but if, like me, you have got dozens of separate logins and passwords for various websites, e-mail accounts, online messenger services and all the other gubbins of life online, you'll welcome what they are doing.

The group was set up a couple of years ago in response to Microsoft's promotion of its own online identity scheme, Passport.

Once you register with Passport you can get access to a variety of websites or other online services through a single online identity.

At the moment it is mostly used by Hotmail, MSN and Messenger, all Microsoft owned services, and although it has 20 million users it has not achieved the dominance Microsoft hoped for.

However, when Microsoft launched Passport a lot of rival computer companies, like Sun, Sony and AOL, were worried that its success would give Microsoft too much power over how people used the net.

In the autumn of 2001 they created their own group, the Liberty Alliance, to offer an alternative.

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Public interest

If Microsoft did manage to make Passport the de facto standard for signing on to websites and then decided to charge a fee or, worse, refused to allow non-US websites to join up, there would be little we could do about it

Bill Thompson

Leaving aside the ridiculous name, designed no doubt to make patriotic Americans feel that in rejecting Microsoft's proprietary approach they are somehow re-enacting the Boston Tea Party and reclaiming their independence, the Liberty Alliance project is worth supporting.

When it comes to online identity anything that puts too much power in the hands of one company should be resisted.

After all, if Microsoft did manage to make Passport the de facto standard for signing on to websites and then decided to charge a fee or, worse, refused to allow non-US websites to join up, there would be little we could do about it.

We have already seen, in the way that web hosting company Akamai refused to work with Arab news station Al-Jazeera, claiming that it was wholly a commercial decision, how US companies can act against the public interest.

None of us would want to see that power in the hands of one company.

So we should welcome a scheme which is genuinely open.

All the Liberty Alliance is doing is producing is a technical standard which any company, individual or government could take and use as the basis for building products and websites around.

The new version of the specification includes a way of letting a user decide which information about themselves they want to share with a website.

Inclusive

The lack of any verifiable, secure and easy-to-use way of identifying ourselves online is one of the biggest blocks to the growth of the web and other online services,

Bill Thompson

This is already available as part of the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) from the Web consortium, but the Liberty Alliance approach is more flexible and far more likely to gain widespread acceptance.

The other important addition is anonymity: you can you log on to a website to use it without actually having to say who you are.

After all, the BBC doesn't have to know that my name is Bill Thompson to give me tailored news, they just need to know that I am a 40-something UK resident who likes technology and doesn't watch sports.

At the same time, the Liberty people are trying to get their system to work with Passport, demonstrating that open standards can be inclusive rather than just a way of fending off competition in the marketplace.

The lack of any verifiable, secure and easy-to-use way of identifying ourselves online is one of the biggest blocks to the growth of the web and other online services, and the work of the Liberty Alliance is vitally important in addressing the issue.

Things could get even more interesting as governments are showing increased awareness of the new standard.

In May the US Department of Defense signed up, as part of a general US Government project called eAuthentication, and it could be used for e-government websites.

There is no indication yet that the UK Government is so forward-looking, and their past history of close involvement with Microsoft might indicate that they would prefer a closed solution to the problem.

But perhaps they can be persuaded that Liberty is important enough to fight for.

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Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.