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Contact networks like plaxo and minifile link your contact information to other people's address books. You are maintaining your address and phone number yourself, and as you record a change it is reflected in all linked address books.
What if you could confirm/verify your identity with these services
if you have a sufficient number of links established with other people.
If you have 1000+ individuals who utilize your plaxo/ minifile address - isn't it more likely to be accurate? You could not only link to individuals but also companies like banks and credit reporting agencies (that could be weighted more heavily).
This would result in an ID score to be used online for online shopping, services signup, issuance of SSL certificates, even renewal of your car registration.
plaxo.com
http://www.plaxo.com/
Online address book; some sort of update / cross-link management. [jutta, Oct 04 2004]
(?) minifile.com
http://minifile.com/index_en.html
Online address book. [jutta, Oct 04 2004]
[link]
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What if you have no friends? Do you have no identity? (ooh, reminds me of Paul Auster's "City of Glass" - great book about identity) |
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Then you get yourself bonded. (You pay a sum of money to an agency that will pay it to people you hurt and close your account.) |
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What if you create 1000 contacts that all verify each other? Does that make them any more real? |
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At my last count, I only knew about 300 people actively by name, and that included people who don't know me (authors, actors, etc.) |
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I assure you that I am me and I also assure you that I do not appear in 1000 people's address books. |
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What will 2 (maximum) people get me credibility-wise? |
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Almost completely off topicly, it still makes me wonder, when we can all distinguish well over a thousand individuals by name, whether or not we know them well enough to put in plaxo, computers are all named things like 1WFC14NE01C. Give them people names, and we'll have a chance of remembering which one is which. And then, of course, they could vouch for your ID. |
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What's to stop these IDs from being stolen? The only thing I can see would be change of address, but people do move, so such a system would result in people not being trusted right after the move. |
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What does it mean for one's "ID" to be "stolen" in this context? |
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