We have just added Employment, Education & Professional License Verification (Beta)

In response to comments from our members and partnering websites, Trufina has expanded our services to include employment, education and professional license verifications. As online transactions between otherwise unrelated individuals increase on the Internet, there is a growing need to increase trust and reduce fraud by providing people the tools to prove that they are who they say they are and to prove that their claimed credentials are real as well. And, to ask others to share their verified information.

Many of you have asked “when can I verify my employment history?” Well the time is NOW. Imagine adding your employment and education history to an ID Card and then sharing it with a prospective new employer. Pretty cool. Remember you are still always in control of what gets shared, and who you share it with.

Trufina provides a secure repository for personal information, and the tools for securely sharing those attributes, under the complete control of the Trufina member. It’s your information. You determine who gets to see it, and when. Rather than entering personally identifiable information at every site
you choose to participate in, Trufina offers the possibility of managing that dissemination from one, secure, manageable location.

We’re always interested in hearing how you’re using your Trufina verified identity information. Let us know. If there are websites that you’d like us to partner with, or if you would like some help showing your verification on a site, please let us know that as well.

- The Trufina Team

Due to overwhelming demand from our members, Trufina has updated their Verified Identity Cards to make it easier for people viewing an Identity Card to ask the owner to see more identity details. The viewer makes a request by filling out the form associated with the Identity Card. Examples of the Trufina Identity Card are:
https://profile.trufina.com/trubarb
or
https://profile.trufina.com/madsen
-
When a request is submitted, the owner of the Trufina Verified ID card receives an email detailing the request. The owner can then choose to do one of the following:
1) Share more details of their identity with the requester.
2) Get more information from the requester before sharing details.
3) Ignore the request.

Trufina puts you in control of your identity, and provides you with the tools to share as little or as much as you want to. Protecting your online identity, as well as giving you the opportunity to build and establish trust in your online relationships.

Try it out. Click on the link above and ask me or Chris to share some details of our identities. We’ll send you an email with a link to the Trufina home page where you can view our IDs. (Note: security standards are in place for limiting the views on the shared id card).

A good summary of online identity management can be found at:
http://www.openparenthesis.org/2008/09/26/online-identity-management

Love to hear from you about our new service.

We’re excited to announce that we rolled out a new feature which allows a Trufina user to share an ID Card with anyone they want. Previously an ID Card could be shared only if both the sender and the recipient were Trufina members. Now, a Trufina member to share an ID Card with anyone who has a valid email address. Total control of the ID Cards is still entirely in the hands of the Trufina user – you control each piece of your identity -

name, age, street, city, state, email/IM addresses, background check, as well as all the others    

Each item can be individually included, or not, as well as showing the details or just that it has been verified (i.e. your actual age, or just that your age has been verified). You can also revoke access to your ID Card at any time.Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.-Chris 

Several weeks ago we rolled into production a new set of API’s which allow partners to integrate Trufina services into their websites, and makes it easier for our users to share their information with websites. We’ve updated our website with some basic information about the API’s, and we’ll be adding more information to the API section of our site over time.

We have also rolled out our API’s with the folks at Naymz. Now Naymz users can access and utilize the Trufina services in a seamless manner – seamless being the keyword. If you are an existing Trufina user, you just have to log into your account and grant the information to Naymz. If you are not, you can go through our verification process. In either case, you can then pull back verified identity information into your Naymz accounts via the Trufina API, and post a verified shield to your Naymz profile. Additionally, users will receive 50 RepScore points if they go through the verification process.

We’re honored and proud to be working with Naymz, and are excited to be part of their offering, as well as providing a great additional service to our members.

One of our folks pointed out that you can go to the below link and, for a $1 charge on your credit card, change your address online with no other verification being done. Seems quite scary – if someone steals (or buys on the internet) your credit card information, they can have all your mail forwarded to them. Another area in which personal identity management, Trufina, or other verified ID Cards (Cardspace comes to mind) could be very useful…

https://moversguide.usps.com/

I went to their comments/contact us section and wrote the following question:

It seems as though a valid credit card is all I would need to change my address – How is this considered secure? If someone steals my credit card they will be able to change my address with the USPS. There are hundreds of locations on the internet that buy/sell credit cards, from what I’ve heard. How can this be considered secure? I ask partly to see if the USPS would be interested in using a more sophisticated solution. Our company, Trufina, would offer the USPS the same solution, but with a much higher level of identity verification.

www.trufina.com

Chris Madsen

Update: I just received the following email reply, and it seems like the USPS is definitely trying to do right by providing a convenience to the US public, but it still seems dangerous to allow a credit card to authenticate oneself. To me the question is how much is good enough, does the proof of knowledge of a credit card number, prove you are the true owner of that card (even with the CVC2/CID code) and the associated identity?

Here is their response:

Dear Postal Customer,

In efforts to provide you with a secure online transaction, there is a
$1.00 authentication processing fee .

When you enter your credit card information the information is used to
validate your transaction by verifying that the address you provided
matches the billing address for your credit card.

If you choose not to use your credit card to submit your change of
address electronically, please feel free to select the print and mail
option on the site.

Sincerely,
USPS MoversGuide Technical Support Group

Just a quick post to let you know that we revised our website, with a new look, and more information about the product, and how it can be used to improve your use of the internet. We’ve also spent a lot of time improving our back end support/email tracking systems. We hope that if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you will write into us.

Trufina recent releases recap

Just want to give our users a quick update: we put out a couple new releases recently (today and another 2 weeks ago) of the application with some tweaks:

- ID/Credential now includes all verifiable data, in a scrollable format (alot of users suggested this change!)
- Member Page/URL now looks like a web page (i.e. http://profile.trufina.com/madsen), and has all possible data in a scrollable format (again, thanks for the feedback)
- Improved interface for renewing your verification information including your criminal background check
- Updated look and layout of Trufina Identity Card(s)
- Allow Basic members from sponsored sites to upgrade to Full membership and get identity verified online
- Member URL string no longer expands to ugly string (was really annoying our developers, )
- bug fix’s and tweaks to the flow

We love the feedback, if you have any, please contact us (post a comment or use http://www.trufina.com/contactus.php)

We’d really like to get more feedback coming in on the product – please keep letting us know.

-Chris Madsen, CEO

The new Trufina affiliates program has just been completed. Find out more or join today at:

http://www.trufina.com/actions/requestpartners.php