Scarce Interest in Verifying my Identity
On December 10, 2009, I posted a short piece on this blog about Trufina, a company providing online identity verification services. Â For a long time, I had a visible Trufina badge on the blog, so someone could click on it to verify that I was, indeed, the very Mark Dixon I claimed to be. Â Since no one expressed interest, I took the badge off my main page.
Just this week, over 18 months later, one person actually clicked on the link in my December 2009 post and requested verification of my identity – not so much that he was interested in my identity as he was in the process of validating online identities.
I have concluded that this dearth of activity must have something to do with the following:
- My blog is rarely read.
- People aren’t interested in Trufina.
- People just don’t care about validation of online identities.
- A combination of the above.
By the way, I have never received a single request from someone via Tru.ly, the similar service whose badge I now display on the right most column of this blog. But I must be patient. Â I just signed up for Tru.ly in March, 2011. Â I have 14 more months before I can really compare the popularity of Tru.ly and Trufina.
I clicked the tru.ly link – but there’s nothing that tells me that it isn’t part of a massive scam on your behalf!
🙂
Oh, Dave … you caught me! No, really – your comment points out a very important issue. The Identity verifying service must be known and trusted in order to be effective. Small startups like Trufina and Tru.ly lack the market presence for people to really know and trust them.
Well – your blog is read… so it could be a combination of 2 and 3…
I actually think there is a 4th…
People don’t do much for badges… and the reason for it is that because of the advertising industry we live and participate in – people are now accustomed to ignore 1/3 of the page we read. All that extra information that includes adds receive much less of our attention – and so we are eng to only go for the block of text that is the meat of the blog.
When a person reads the blog and finds it interesting… they go to the comments… if they are curious they go for the rest of the screen and look at older posts, your tweets etc..
I think there is a genuine interest in validation of identities – but the way that they have modelled it, it simply blends in an area that we have trained ourselves to ignore with our eyes 😀
Agree that people don’t care about validation of online identities. The very phrase is boring, unless it strikes us as Big Brother.
We do care, though, about knowing how much to trust someone on craigslist or a dating site or airbnb. The internet is one big knock-knock moment: do we open the door this time, or not?
Mark –
I think this is a LOA issue. Verifying the author of a blog is probably really low on people’s priority list. If there is something posted on your blog I will assume that it’s from you … if it’s not really from you does it matter much? ( … it does matter but not so much from a “risk” perspective). It’s also a really loose implementation of Federation (really loose). To post to your blog site you would have to authenticate to your blog host … I am trusting that you authenticated before posting and that because of that you are the person that you claim to be on your blog.
I feel that people might not have got options to secure their identity from spammers and hackers but most of them would have some day or other would have been suffered from identity theft.
With the growing technology spammers and hackers are also gaining knowledge and updating themselves to attack personal details of people. But simultaneously, security service providers are gradually developing ways to prevent identity theft. I am aware of one such service provider
whose Telephone Verification, Two-Factor Authentication, and PhoneID prevent credit card and online fraud considerably. Their global scalability and easy integration is the main USP which has helped them to spread their services around the globe. I would like you to watch their product demos http://www.telesign.com/products-demos/ and Find them @ Facebook.