Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:00a.m.
Imagine never having to fill in another registration form where you regurgitate the same information again and again; name, surname, telephone number, address, email address, birth date, gender, health insurance number, driver’s licence number, passport number, bank account number etc.
The same information, over and over again. And if you change just one bit of that information, you have to remember where you needed to give that piece of information, contact those organisations and let them know of the change.
That can all change, by implementing a system modelled off a couple of ideas that have been working—quite successfully—on the internet with web services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many other services that you use everyday.
NZ would implement one card—not the one from Woolworths, Foodtown or Countdown but a similar idea—that acts as your ID, your driver’s license and also a means of transferring/accessing personal information.
A centralised system that stores your personal information and allows 3rd-parties access depending on the level of clearance you give them, much like Facebook Connect. Simply swipe your card and enter a PIN to give clearance to your information.
No more filling in forms with the same information every place you go; the video store, the gym, the doctor — yes, your medical records will follow you from your local GP to the Accident and Emergency room, meaning there’ll be less time wasted filling in forms or getting important information from your GP; information like allergies or other vital pieces of personal medical history that could save, or take, your life.
What if you lose your card? Or if it is stolen; someone will have access to everything! They could take on your identity! The card can’t be used without a PIN; if that’s good enough for your money, then it should do for your identification and personal information. The PIN could take any form; whether it’s a literal number (like we use for EFTPOS), or a biometric reading (like a thumb print.)
A PIN will be required for any action or clearance to take place; that is if the video store owner, receptionist at the GP or personal trainer at the gym doesn’t question you for not resembling your ID photo.
It becomes ever harder to look like your sister’s driver’s licence photo from when she was 18, once you turn 18, if the photo that appears on screen is no longer of your 18 year-old sister but one that was taken last week when she created a new bank account.
Your photo ID is updated every time the system logs a new photo; say when you sign up for a new bank account. If you go to the video store, they have the latest photo to identify you by. The reverse isn’t true, an organisation will only see the latest picture of you, from organisations with clearance levels above them. That means the video store clerk can’t help someone else steal your identity by replacing your photo on the system with another person’s photo.
Other benefits of a centralised system mean that once you are enrolled and actively using it, you only need to make changes once. Change your address with the post office and your address will change everywhere at once.
This idea is an evolution of the OpenID solution that was proposed (and now widely implemented) for consolidating your online identity. The idea behind OpenID is that authentication with all web services are done by the same 3rd-party (your OpenID provider) so that once you login, you just need to point a service to your OpenID URL to login with that service. For example, once I have logged into my OpenID at
www.ludwignz.com, if I want to log into another web service that has OpenID support, I only need to point that web service to
www.ludwignz.com and can login, without authenticating again (or providing a username and password unique to that service).
The OpenID standard also allows you to create ‘personas’ (similar to the clearance levels proposed for OneCard) where you can specify what personal information, various web services are allowed to access. One place to log in, one place to keep your personal information up to date. Perfect.
Just one idea—stolen from the interwebs—that we can adapt to make NZ a better place.