It was an interesting several days of discussions at the IIW this week in Mountain View. The event brought together individuals who have been passionate about driving user-centric identity for many years, as well as some of the newer players in the space who bring a more corporate perspective, trying to balance business model with user control.
At a high level, there was much continued discussion on the concept personal data stores (PDSs) which would be completely controlled by the End User and fully portable. Two key challenges remain with this vision: 1) the major identity providers who have the critical mass of users and data, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, PayPal, etc., are not (yet) interoperable or provide the End User a “copy” of their data, and 2) there is no obvious business model for PDSs that doesn’t include these providers.
At a more technical level, our team had the following key takeaways:
