State of Utah CIO Phil Windley shares his initial thoughts on digital identity in state government.
Like it or not, states are in the identity business. We like to claim that we’re just in the licensing business, but the truth is that, for better or worse, the state issued driver’s license is the gold standard for identification in the physical world.
Windley will be speaking at next week’s Digital ID World Conference in Denver (along with one of my partners, Carol Coye Benson).
Jon Udell also points to Windley’s log and laments the state of PKI.
Digital IDs remain a stillborn technology because nobody wanted to slow down the e-commerce juggernaut by burdening consumers with another licensing and registration procedure. So we prop up all of e-commerce with the $50 cap on credit-card liability, and write off the fraud as a cost of doing business. In truth, that may be an acceptable cost. But what about the lost opportunity cost?
The two major bank card associations, Visa and MasterCard, both have major initiatives underway designed to dramatically reduce credit card fraud. Verified by Visa and MasterCard’s SecureCode both implement a new architecture for online payments which requires the cardholder to authenticate herself with a password on each transaction.