Last summer, I set up a ClaimID account but didn’t do much with it. Prompted by Bill Drew’s post on the Library 2.0 forum on his experiments with it, I decided to revisit my account and update it a bit. Coming up with categories to differentiate the many kinds of works of mine that are online proved a bit tricky. To distinguish between blogs and wikis that are authored by a group, I came up with “group blogs” and “group wikis;” for blogs and wikis that entirely my own, I settled on “solo blogs” and “solo wikis.” There’s more for me to add, but I see that this effort is turning into something of an online CV for me.
ClaimID suggests that you can use your ClaimID URL to logon to sites that allow for OpenID logon. I just did so to log in to my Ma.gnolia account, which has been dormant since February 2006 (I’ve been more committed to del.icio.us over the years). You can see a screencast about how OpenID works on the Read/WriteWeb site.
It’s not clear to me if there’s going to be a critical mass of web sites that adopt OpenID sign on, although some folks see that on the horizon. I’m a bit worried about security issues of having a single sign-on for all places where I have accounts. Although it is a pain to manage all of those user names and passwords, there is some security in having lots of different ones; if one is compromised, that doesn’t compromise all the others. If my ClaimID user name/password is discovered, though, that would give someone access to all of my other accounts that allow for OpenID login, a rather frightening scenario.
I think we each need to choose the right balance between information we don’t mind sharing (our “identity”) and information we want to keep to ourselves (our “privacy”). I wouldn’t for example, list where I do my banking on my ClaimID page.
There has been a lot of talk about OpenID lately – which is great – but it seems to me that people are getting so caught up in their identity, that they’re forgetting about their privacy. There needs to be more balance: no person is all-public, or all-private.
I’m a co-founder of an online password manager, so I get asked often “Isn’t that useless since everyone will soon be using OpenID?” The answer is: of course not. There will always be passwords (and keys, and codes, and notes and links) that you’d like to keep private. That’s what gets locked up int he password manager. Then there are the things you want to share with the world (like your CV and portfolio and community interaction), for those there is OpenID and services like ClaimID.
Like I said – I think it’s a balance each one of us needs to strike.
Just my two cents.
Tara