With internet searches playing an increasingly important role in murder trials, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling for a boycott of Google's desktop, with cellular phone data being available online, with Yahoo! helping out censors and dictators jail dissidents... privacy and online identity have never been such a hot issue.

It will remain so for a while as I am not sure anyone involved in the identity business today is trustworthy.

Who should build an identity meta system?

Corporations like Microsoft or Google? I would argue that no, because they simply do not have my best interest in mind and like Rebecca McKinnon says:
I am not interested in helping geeks play God.
The governement? Ideally yes but it looks like they do not have the best intentions either.

Given the global nature of the internet, it seems to me that a body like the United Nations should be involved in these discussions. Yet, the WSIS final declaration does not even touch on the subject.

It seems to me that if I, as a individual cannot manage my identity and my personomy, then no one can.

privacy, personomies, microsoft, infocards