[raju2011]

Way back in 1993, Peter Steiner extolled privacy on the internet. In 2011, Google, PayPal and Equifax are the first three official, federally credentialed, Identity Providers of the NSTICs (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace) Identity Ecosystem. Not only is your identity important, you have been tracked, discovered and analyzed.

The NSTIC is a government strategy that is guiding the development of the “Trust Framework” and the “Identity Ecosystem”. The Trust Framework is that framework which all Identity Providers, private (federally credentialed) companies, will operate. It sets out rules, procedures and a network of peers that will peer-regulate the others in the framework. The Identity Ecosystem is the process and protocols in which the identities, yours and mine, will be held. It governs the transaction of your identity across providers and third parties who interact with your identity. It also will define the systems that will be utilized and how credentials will be passed between user and 3rd party, allowing for the ID Provider to act as the intermediary to confirm the trustworthiness of the individual.

So what? Well, the risk is that ID Provider who is authenticating your data is also able to then de-anonymize your data to discover who did what, when, where and why. In the NSTIC world, that data is all held in one or a few Identity Provider databases with all your online activities of ANY SITE that participates in the NSTIC online authentication system and maybe even outside of that (have you heard of the Facebook tracking cookie that logs your visits to sites AFTER YOU LOG-OUT of Facebook?).

- Credits: SearchEngineWatch dotcom