OpenID to the Rescue
Jan 15th, 2008 by Aswath
Yesterday’s big news item related to our industry was that MySpace reached an agreement with 49 of the 50 state attorneys general that it will lead the fight to stop sex predators. Based on the news reports that it will work on among other things
- developing better technology to screen out underage users
- age and id verification technology
- default user profiles of 16 and 17 year olds to a private category.
But if we focus on those children who would like to positively identify their age and at the same time not allow others to freely interact, then OpenID could do the job. We can request the school district to issue OpenID to their students – after all they all have reserved domain names of the form k12.state.us – that will be valid only if they maintain their student status. Since the schools are in a better position to authenticate the age of the students and that the management of the ID is distributed, it is scalable and can be realized in a short order. The agreement also calls for the ability to allow adult family members to interact with the minors. This also can be done by the school district because they can assign differentiated OpenID to the family members. The family members and the age group of the student can be made part of the Attribute Exchange process.
Facebook used email id issued by an .edu domain name holder for identification. Use of OpenID is similar to that but can be enriched because of Attribute Exchange. Of course, the ultimate control is for each family to run its own social network in a distributed manner. That is one of the applications of EnThinnai.
[…] by Sun assures the relying parties that they are dealing with Sun employees. As I suggested in the previous post, schools can issue OpenIDs to its students. OpenID becomes useful if the OpenID providers mediate […]