Contact networks like plaxo and minifile link your contact information to other people's address books. You are maintaining your address and phone number yourself, and as you record a change it is reflected in all linked address books.
What if you could confirm/verify your identity with these services if you have a sufficient number of links established with other people.
If you have 1000+ individuals who utilize your plaxo/minifile address - isn't it more likely to be accurate? You could not only link to individuals but also companies like banks and credit reporting agencies (that could be weighted more heavily).
This would result in an ID score to be used online for online shopping, services signup, issuance of SSL certificates, even renewal of your car registration.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
A related question: if we all shared a giant storage space (like the One Big Computer and everyone had access to everying (no encrypted secret password file anywhere to do a look-up against) how could we identify ourselves to each other to know who to thank for the help they give us?
One answer might be through using those we have linked to... at first you don't know for sure who someone is, then as you establish a history with them you can figure out how to identify them yourself, or perhaps aided by the computer... based on their behavior, their response to you and your questions, etc, etc your might get an indentity score of some kind.
Maybe you just have to trust everybody and record everything so that any actions can be reversed if they turn out to be fraudulent or otherwise in error.
I write about the concept of voluntary payments for free goods and services: My Two Cents. If we use such a system, we would still want to be fairly certain we were making our voluntary payments to the correct party. How to do this? We could assume that the correct party will be more successful in convincing people who they are close to (after all they are continuing to create (music, art, whatever), so people close to them directly see where it is coming from. We would expect those people to be linked directly to the artist via contact information (plaxo, whatever) and they could vouch for the truthfulness of the claim that, for example Dave Matthews is really dm@aol.com, or account #12345678. Such verifications would be recorded publicly and any incorrect verifications would drop the verifiers (the close contact) relative weight toward the ID score.
yes yes yes this will work!!!!
no more passwords!!!!!!!!!!"is this NateJ17?""yes it is""OK, but if you are not, we will figure it out really fast by polling a few of NateJ17's contacts and your permanent, public reputation will show an error in identification."
Such an error wouldn't be fatal, as we are all human and are bound to make a few mistakes, but they would cause you to lose credibility among the participating online network, and you could be refused goods and services as a result. How to get your reputation back up again? correctly respond to verification requests generated by your contacts... and provide a good explanation of how the mistake was an error and not a deliberate attempt to falsify the transaction. The record of the incident and your response will stay indefinitely, stored on the One Big Computer. Present yourself accurately, or live with a record of your actions. beautiful.
nate
Wow
That is one of the best win-win business models I have heard in a long time. The consumer is provided with a free service, that with todays growing technology needs is a must, handling your contact information.
The business is also making the money he needs to stay afloat by charging other businesses a small fee for information that is a must know for a safe business to operate.
All I have to say is kudos my friend, for such a fantastic idea.
rbgCODE.com