Digital Identity

Chapter 4. Privacy and Identity

Several years ago, General Motors set out to create a company-wide telephone directory. Of course, in the 21st century you don't create a printed phone directory for a company as large as GM; you create an online directory. Two years and numerous legal hurdles later, GM had an online phone directory. This tale is amazing, given that GM wasn't trying to do anything particularly difficult, like aggregate identity pools or implement single sign-on company wide. They were simply creating a phone directory; something companies have been doing for a hundred years.

GM's hang-up was not the technology, but rather the legal challenges presented by differing privacy laws and regulations in each of the many countries where GM has employees. European privacy laws are much stricter than those in the United States. Privacy turned a seemingly simple project into a two-year ordeal.

More and more corporations and government agencies are appointing Chief Privacy Officers, high-level officials whose job is to ensure that identity data is protected. The reason is simple: privacy is a big deal. People believe that their identity data should be private. They don't necessarily believe that everyone else's data should be private, but they want to protect their own identities.

Who's Afraid of RFID?

RFID stands for "radio frequency identification device." RFID tags are small integrated circuits that broadcast an identifying code whenever they're hit with radio frequency radiation. ...