Present at the Creation

After spending last Friday talking to press and analysts about the launch of the Information Card Foundation, I arrived home to find in my US Mail box, a letter from my "bank and trust company" which stated:

"Dear Mr. Andres,

"I am writing to let you know about the theft of computer equpment from a third party....Because the stolen equipment contained data with certain personal information about you...such as your name and social security number...We have been in close contact with law enforcement ....we deeply regret this has happened."

In addition, last week I had to:

• locate a password that I had not used in 2 months.
• create 2 new usernames and new passwords for 2 websites, filling out the usual form with name, address, email address, phone number, credit card number, expiration date, secret card code, etc.

For all of us the Internet has been a wonderful transformational experience. Information at your fingertips, as Bill Gates famously said, has changed our lives. We can comparison shop, buy custom products, find hard-to-find replacement parts, locate nearly any book or record we ever wanted to own, provide feedback on products and services, get answers to almost any question, etc. My kids can't imagine life without it.

But the Internet wasn't originally designed to handle every economic or social transaction, or the need to prove you are you, or the claims you make. Today we need this capability.

A group of passionate and concerned members of the community of engineers, designers, and architects want to enable such capability on laptops, PCs, phones, PDAs, etc. To do this requires a simple, easy-to-understand metaphor. And to make this work everywhere,
the underlying architecture has to be secure, interoperable, cross-industry, heterogeneous, non-centralized, and with user control to reflect the real-time changes in each of our lives.

Information Cards are up to this challenge. They can enable changes that could increase Internet ease of use and security by an order of magnitude. The Internet envisioned by the Information Card Foundation has all flexibility and freedom we enjoy today, but with the following enhancements:

• You can 'click-in' to a website. If you already have an i-card you have designated as the card you always use for this site, one click and you're in.
• Just as you do in real life, you can wield claims that others make about you. Claims that can be verified.
• My bank might not have to give out my personal information to a third party. They could provide temporary approved links to verified pointers without revealing the actual personal data at all.

Thinking about how my past week would have been different with Information Cards, I imagine:

• I would have 'clicked-in' to the site I had not visited in two months, without needing to look up or remember anything, or being worried that this particular password was lost, stolen, or erased.
• I would have saved at least 20 minutes not filling out forms and checking to make sure I did everything right, including inventing passwords, then re-inventing them to fit the website's requirements: (8 letters, 1 number, no dashes, etc.)
• I would have paid more attention to why I was at these websites in the first place, rather than dealing with a clumsy lock on the front door. Imagine if we had to go through that to get into a store at the mall!
• I would not be receiving these anxiety-causing letters leaving me fearful of doing business with a 'bank and trust' that I can no longer trust.

Paul Trevithick said today that he is sure that we will look back at this time, before Information Cards, and wonder how we ever got anything done. And that day will be just like my kids today not being able to imagine life without the Internet.