Marblehead, MA, and Washington, DC, April 15, 2011 — Upon the invitation of Jeremy Grant, Senior Executive Advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), managing the National Program Office for the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), Trufina demonstrated the commercial use of their Verified Identity Credentials at Friday’s NSTIC signing event.

Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, was joined by U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, Special Assistant to the President and the Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt, and other dignitaries to officially release the White House National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. “We must do more to help consumers protect themselves, and we must make it more convenient than remembering dozens of passwords,” said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, speaking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Working together, innovators, industry, consumer advocates, and the government can develop standards so that the marketplace can provide more secure online credentials, while protecting privacy, for consumers who want them.”

Trufina wholeheartedly supports the NSTIC initiative which aims to make online transactions more trustworthy, thereby giving businesses and consumers more confidence in conducting business online. “Trufina was founded to provide a secure and efficient way for consumers and businesses to build trust and reduce fraud in online relationships on the Internet,” stated Jim Kinchley, CEO of Trufina. “We are particularly gratified to have been asked to share our technologies and services in this partnership of innovators, consumer advocates and government, and look forward to integrating our user-centric solutions into government applications in the near future.”

The Trufina team demonstrated “live” implementations in use today at:

• www.hour.ly, allowing temporary workers to voluntarily share their verified identities and clear criminal search results to prospective employers in a safe and secure manor; facilitating efficient, cost effective hiring processes
• www.mavenresearch.com, providing verified credentials to their community of professionals, who then share their expertise in online consults with paying clients, and
• www.naymz.com, a professional networking community that allows people to find and discover new connections, opportunities, ideas, and information based on their backgrounds and reputations. Members are able to voluntarily share their Trufina verified credentials to bolster their online reputations.

About Trufina, Inc.
Trufina is the leading provider of online identity verification and identity management services, enabling individuals to verify their identity attributes online, and providing the identity management tools for sharing that verified identity information with individuals and websites across the Internet. Trufina offers a unique method of building trust on the Internet. As the independent “trusted source” for id verification, Trufina protects the privacy of the individual while limiting the opportunity for fraud and identity theft from partnering websites. Based in Marblehead, MA, Trufina can be found at http://www.trufina.com.

As was originally reported by Nick Corcodilos, our friends at hour.ly, The Social Employment Network For Part-Time, Temporary, Freelance & Hourly Workers, recently noted, Honesty is Still the Best Policy. To help recruiters and employers differentiate between frauds and legitimate candidates, hour.ly suggests promoting your verified identity early in the hiring process. Trufina enables you to verify your complete resume and gives you the tools to share it securely with sites like hour.ly as well as with anyone you would like.

Care to know if I’m really who I say I am? Click on my Trufina seal below, and ask me to share my credentials.

In brief, Jeremy provided a summary of what NSTIC is, why we need NSTIC, and what’s coming up in the near future regarding NSTIC. For a quick overview of the NSTIC vision check out the NSTIC Explanatory Video
provided on the NSTIC.US site.

The strategy release and formal signing ceremony at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce and Howard Schmidt, Cyber-Security Coordinator of the Obama Administration in attendance, will take place April 15th at 11:00. Trufina is honored to have been invited.

Jeremy hopes to have formal pilot projects funded in FY12 with private industry leading the technology development and government agencies providing support.

Today, we congratulate hour.ly as they emerge from beta with their announcement about partnering with tinychat, provider of video chat services, and Trufina:
Hour.ly Lets Employers Interview Potential Temp Hires With Browser Based Video Chat, by Lora Kolodny, and Hourly is First to Launch In-Browser Video Interviewing for Employers

Brooke and co-founder Lynn Dixon, were, and are, most interested in building an online community based on trust, which expedites the process of hiring and getting hired in the temporary employment markets, and they identified Trufina’s services as a mechanism for achieving that.

They’ve essentially turned the normal employment pyramid on its head. Instead of employers leafing through myriads of resumes and profiles, narrowing their search to the few better qualified candidates and then conducting interviews and background checks on them; with Trufina’s help, hour.ly facilitates searches that instantly bring qualified candidates to their attention, and further highlight those that have already gone through Trufina’s criminal background checking service.

For the hiring employer the benefits are self-evident. For the candidate they make a minor investment in time and money and are rewarded in preferential search results, plus they can now use the same identity verification and criminal background check over and over again, at no additional expense or effort…to apply for additional positions listed on hour.ly, not to mention on the growing number of websites that are also partnering with Trufina.

Our mission is to ease concerns about identity theft and fraud, and to restore trust in online interactions. We want to provide individuals and businesses with the tools to make online transactions safe and secure. Today, we applaud hour.ly’s adoption of our mantra, and we look forward to working closely with them and their members in building a world class community.

IIW is a working group of Identity Commons. The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities…all strong tenets of Trufina’s mission.

The introductory presentations provided a good overview of the history of Open Identity and where it stands today:

Kaliya Hamlin – Introduction to the Identity Community
Mary Ruddy – Open Identity for Open Government

Most of the sessions revolved around: NSTIC (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, pronounced n-stick), Personal Data Storage, and Open Identity Liability. All the sessions were interesting. Information sharing between a common interest group was certainly achieved. Were we naive to think that more concrete results would have been the outcome? Probably. For another attendees point of view check out Ian Glazer’s blog entry. All of the notes from the workshop sessions should be published in the near future on the IIW site.

Trufina is committed to embracing open identity standards and helping shape those standards on the Internet. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

You might also take a look at the Cyberspace Bill of Rigths presented by Jeff Jarvis. In particular I find that the following 2 Rights resonate with what Trufina offers:

VI. We have the right to control our data.
VII We have the right to own our identity.

Identity verification was highlighted again during a Q&A session between CNET’s Declan McCullagh and Chris Kelly (Facebook’s former Chief Privacy Officer). During the live feed, broadcast at the conference, Chris expressed his conviction for the need and liklihood of a strong identity platform in the future of the web and social media.

The future is now! Trufina provides the platform. Do you see the need for building trust in the world of social communities by sharing verified identity information? Let us know.

“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.

So, we are intrigued by “A new approach to taming the trolls” by Paul McNamara, in NetWork World‘s ‘Buzz, http://bit.ly/bqpmEz. Most everyone that has spent any time in a news media’s public comment section has seen where a few recalcitrant’s can spoil an otherwise valuable forum for public debate.

In this case, The Sun Chronicle, http://bit.ly/b4Kulo, first choose to shut the comments forum down, then decided to reopen the section based on requiring usage of real names and a credit card charge of 99 cents.

A couple of thoughts on why we’d advocate for Trufina’s style of verification:
- In these days of identity theft, why would the paper want to capture unnecessary credit card information from users, and shouldn’t users resist giving it.

- If a user has shared their verified identity information with the paper, why not let them use a pseudonym for their comments. They get to enjoy the freedom associated with anonymity, while accepting the responsibility of the paper knowing who they are.

- In the event that the commenter wants to participate in other online forums, or take responsibility and build trust in other online transactions, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if through their initial Trufina verification, participants could share verified identity information without additional cost or hassle.

One of these days we’ll connect with a publication on proving our point. The traditional newspaper industry has been reticent to limit any “traffic” to their online properties. Maybe they need to hear from participants that agree with our view. Reasonable people don’t want to subject themselves to unreasonable blather, and don’t mind taking responsibility for their behavior.