After uploading yesterday’s blog post, I realized that I had again made a statement about a problematic “conflict of interest” inherent in many Identity providers.

What do I mean by that?

For many years, I have dreamed of the concept of a broadly used Identity Provider enabling each of us to leverage one set of identity credentials to reach service providers, with personal control over which bits of our personal information would be shared with each service provider.  

I just checked way back on my blog to find a few examples of my early yearnings:

• May 2005: Credit Bureau as Identity Provider? (first month I blogged)
• June 2006: Verisign, Personal Identity Provider
• June 2006: Symantec – Identity Provider?
• May 2007: Mobile Operators as Identity Providers
• December 2009: My Christmas Wish List: Personal Identity-Persona Service (It wasn’t under the tree that year)
• December 2012: Facebook – My Identity Arbiter?

Well, now we are in 2017.  The technology is widely available to make that happen. Can’t we just use Facebook, Google, Twitter or Amazon? Well yes, sort of. However, I propose that the biggest problem with any of these organizations really filling the role of a universal identity provider is that they all have massive conflicts of interest.

Facebook, Google and Twitter really just want to sell my eyeballs and mouse clicks to the highest bidder in an advertising war.  Amazon just wants to sell me stuff. 

Why would any of these companies ever really want to allow me to use the relationship I have developed with them to establish a relationship with a competitor?  Only if it is calculated to benefit their their interests, to be sure.

Such conflicts of interest are grounds for employee termination in many companies (or should be), yet it happens all the time on the Internet.  I suppose that only when truly independent identity providers like Sovrin are widely adopted will we escape these conflicts of interest.