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.

Ever wonder if the tweet you are reading is really from who you think it is? Or wonder if you are following who you think you are? Or wonder who is following you? I certainly do, especially given the press over the last several months about falsified twitter accounts. Please try our identity verification service and ask your followers to do the same. Let us know what you think. You can use the code ‘twitterid’ at sign up to by-pass payment. We’re evaluating additional services and would appreciate any and all suggestions you may have for how this capability might be applied at Twitter, or any other site for that matter.

You can contact us at http://www.trufina.com/contactus.php

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
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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.

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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.

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…

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.