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September 8, 2008
Microsoft Proposes Online Digital ID for Kids
“A Microsoft white paper [suggests] that children get digital identity cards to verify their age and better protect them online. But not everyone is convinced it’s the right approach.
“‘It’s not 100 percent clear to me that there’s a compelling reason to validate the age of kids going to a social networking site,’ Larry Magid, a technology journalist, child safety advocate and member of the Internet Safety Task Force (ISTF), told InternetNews.com. ‘Is the solution going to be worse than the problem?’
“Microsoft’s suggestion (available here in PDF format) came in July in response to the ISTF’s call for solutions. The plan would require that government, schools, or private companies certify children’s identities and ages based on personal documents like birth certificates.”
Microsoft’s brief white paper focuses less on social networking sites as we tend to think of them now (e.g. MySpace or Facebook) and more on online communities created specifically for children.
It proposes its own Windows CardSpace as an underlying framework for identity creation and management, which is enough to warrant a skeptical reading, since the paper also calls for the involvement of large institutional bodies to handle the process.
CardSpace is made available by Microsoft under its Open Specification Promise, which was recently updated to make it useful even for developers licensing their work under the GPL.
Personally, I’m less concerned with Microsoft’s involvement than I am with the broader implications of any national identity database.
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 1:31 PM | Add Comment
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