Did you get a chance to read the draft version of the NSTIC , published by the White House, June 25? We sure did, and we’re hoping to be part of the community moving the national strategy forward. Here’s a quote from the introductory paragraph:

“Imagine a world where individuals can seamlessly access information and services online from a variety of sources – the government, the private sector, other individuals, and even across national borders – with reduced fear of identity theft or fraud, lower probability of losing access to critical services and data, and without the need to manage many accounts and passwords. Individuals can conduct a wide variety of transactions online and trust the identities of the entities with which they interact. Individuals know what information service providers are collecting about them and how they are using it. They have choice in the number and types of user-friendly identity credentials they manage and use to assert their identity online.”

Trufina has not only been imagining that world, we’ve been building it….read our initial comments, Enhanced Online Security, Reduced Fraud and Personal Privacy. Today! Take a few additional moments to register on the forum and vote “I agree” at the top of our post. With your support our views will get more attention.

If you have an opinion on the strategy, post your comments there as well. Let us know and we’ll link to them in this blog. It’s a good opportunity to tell the government, and the entire internet community what you think.

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

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There’s lots of good stuff in the New Scientist article Don’t let cyber-spite ruin your good name, and a bunch of great companies mentioned – ClaimID, TrustPlus, and ReputationDefender . The issue is not just reputation, and the protection of your reputation (which is certainly the end result), but is the person posting a comment, negative or positive, really real or completely anonymous?

Just like in the real world, someone is more likely to shout some craziness from the bleachers, versus in an in person forum, where they have to introduce themselves in some fashion but they do have to prove they are identifiable.

Don’t let cyberspite destroy your good name

You buy a television on eBay. When it arrives, you eagerly unwrap it, only to find it is badly scratched. You return it, and leave a negative comment about the seller on the site. The next day, you find the seller has retaliated by posting a nasty comment about you, branding you as a time-waster. Suddenly, no one wants to sell to you and your reputation is in tatters.

Until now eBay’s rating system, which allows users of the auction and trading site to leave good or bad comments about their trading partners, has worked well. Sellers who ship out damaged goods, or items that do not match their online description, rightly get a black mark against their name. However, this system has recently come under increasing pressure from an all-too-human failing: spite. Sellers can easily retaliate against buyers who have named and shamed them, leaving unwarranted but highly visible comments – perhaps claiming that the buyers do not follow through with purchases, or needlessly return items they have bought.

Fear of this retaliatory renegging can deter buyers from posting negative comments about their trading experiences. In turn, this threatens to undermine the trust that buyers place in sellers ratings.

So severe has the renegging problem become that this month eBay was forced to change its rating system, preventing sellers from posting negative comments about bad buyers on the site.

In an online auction site like eBay, your reputation is your livelihood. Economists Daniel Houser of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and John Wooders of the University of Arizona, Tucson, have shown that sellers with positive ratings are able to sell items at higher prices, because buyers will willingly shell out greater sums just to be sure they are buying from a trustworthy source. And more people are likely to bid on items offered by those of good standing (Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, vol 15, p 353).

In a study to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research next month, Amar Cheema of Washington University in St Louis also found that when a seller’s reputation is less than squeaky clean, bidders are more likely to scrutinize additional costs such as shipping charges and bail out if they are too high. When the seller’s reputation is good, however, buyers are less interested in such surcharges, and sellers are more likely to secure a deal.

Trading websites are not the only place where nasty comments can have serious financial implications. When someone writes something malicious about you online it can be read by anyone typing your name into a search engine for years to come – including potential employers and university admissions staff. And as the number of websites that people use to buy and sell or make new friends and business contacts increases, so too does the need to guard against such acts of cyber-spite.

Along similar lines of the Linkedin Trufina Verified groups, we have also come up with respective Trufina Verified ID and Trufina Verified Background groups on Facebook.

Facebook has been touted as the next big thing, and has become one of the center of attractions for the online community, especially among adolescents. All that said, due to its huge numbers, and like any other site, Facebook too has the capability to succumb to online predators and fraudsters.

In an effort to avoid this, and to build a circle of trust among the Facebook community, Trufina has initiated the groups as mentioned above. If you are a Trufina verified online identity, and would like to project your “you are who you say you are” self on Facebook, please join the group using: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13076469612, and email us at facebook@trufina.com.

We have recently been receiving requests from users about initiating a Linkedin-Trufina verified ID and a Linkedin-verified background group. The groups have been initiated along with a view point of enrolling users with a verified ID and/or verified background.

The initiative is another effort at increasing the population of verified online identities, and we believe that Linkedin as a networking site is the perfect benchmark; primarily because Trufina verified users can now connect with fellow verified members personally and professionally, and be assured of their identities.

To join the groups, please use the following links: 

1)      Are you Trufina ID verified? Click here to join: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/35353/2370FD28CA65

2)      Are your Trufina verified background? Click here to join: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/69510/145F6A7B5B27W

We would be appreciative of anything you would like to add or recommend. So, if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to write to us. 

 

 

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 

I was really moved by the FrontLine news story – Growing Up Online , and found it incredibly insightful about todays internet and social interactions. It highlights MANY positive, as well as negative, ways people interact online. Some for the better and, in some cases, for the worse. One comment by Rachel Dretzin was most interesting – “… it became clear that the supposed anonymity and immediacy of the Internet had led him to say things he never would say in “real” life — and didn’t even mean. It was a game, an exercise, a way of trying on identities. …”

It is clear, not just from the above piece, but news stories to numerous to mention, that traditional forms of social interaction are being replaced by virtual socializing. We thought we were busy when we were kids, yet it seems to be so much faster these days, and given traditional human traits we tend to do the easy things first – and socializing online is one of those. It’s faster and it allows you to multitask while you’re doing it. It doesn’t replace traditional hanging out, but it does present our society with a new set of social norms and challenges
Trufina, and other companies like Naymz, TrustPlus, and initiatives like OpenID and CardSpace, can certainly help fill the void that exists today regarding virtual identity, but we’re only part of the solution. Some of the burden, or atleast responsibility, lies with the websites that give unlimited tools to people online, the media, as well as each individual, parent or child, to continually educate ourselves on our hyper evolving society.

As a follow on to the piece, the Washington Post published a discussion with the the producers which well worth reading, too.

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.

Just a quick note – we noticed that Linkedin has added a cool new Group feature, and we asked Linkedin to create a group for Trufina. If you want to join the group, check out the section of our web site where have examples on how to include your Trufina ID at various sites. A request will be sent to Trufina, and we’ll verify you are a member, and add you to the group.

It’s pretty way of creating a directory of verified individuals. Please let us know if you have any questions or ideas…

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