On September 23rd and 24th Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center hosted an Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) open meeting, where 15 companies made presentations on technological solutions intended to help make the Internet safer for America’s youth. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force, you recall, was created in February 2008 by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace.

Anyone following the public meetings should be interested in icouldbe.org’s recently published news story about their participation. Frankly, icouldbe.org’s presentation was the only one by a company fully committed to providing an absolutely safe environment for youth on the Internet. In fact, their existence depends on it. We’re grateful to have them as a partner on the development of Trufina’s Child Protection Suite.

The most informative presentation at the meeting might have been the one given by a few of the youth representing Teenangels.org, which is part of WiredSafety.org Teenangels is a group of 13-18 year-old volunteers that have been specially trained by the local law enforcement, and many other leading safety experts in all aspects of online safety, privacy, and security. The teenangels research indicated that children and youth feel that their biggest online threat was from cyberbullying, and that the most effective means for limiting cyberbullying would be to provide tools to identify offenders, to kick the
‘bad actors” off the hosting community sites, and to ban them thereafter. So if the technology companies were listening, the keys are:

- Apparent anonymity needs to be accompanied by tools to hold offenders responsible. The teenangels specified tools for identity verification, not just age specific verification, so that offenders can be identified.
-The identity tools need to allow the hosting website to remove the offenders quickly, and to ban them permanently. So the tools must prove uniqueness.

As in daily life, cyberbullying is perpetrated by a minority of the community. Once children and youth realize that they will be banned permanently from participation, their behavior will improve, or they will not be allowed to play in the digital playground created by the hosting community sites.

Not coincidentally, the tools for limiting cyberbullying are similar to the ones that should be used for keeping predatory adults from interacting with children. And guess what, the combination of anonymity through the use of pseudonyms, coupled with identity verification by a hosting web site, would provide the same benefit of cleaning up adult behavior on forums and blogs Internet wide. Is it possible that improved behavior by adults might influence the behavior of our youth?

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.

With an overwhelming amount of fraud in online auction sites there are now steps auction sites can take to aggressively identify scammers and keep them off the auction site. Many auction sites are able to identify scammers and block them from the auction site, using IP address validation/location, credit card verification, etc., but they don’t have a way to combat the scammers from signing up again, and again, and again. Trufina and identity verification can help. We recommend the follow steps:

1) Identify the bad guy. During the auction site registration process, require all buyers and sellers to get their identity verified from Trufina. Insisting on a verification process during registration will ensure that members are using their “real” identities. Requiring accountability will deter potential scammers from even registering on your site.

2)Shut down their account. Once you’ve confirmed abuse of your terms of service, on your site, and identify the responsible party, you can close/suspend their account, keeping a record of their Trufina identification number. Even if you do not ask the user for any specific information about themselves, you can still keep a “digital fingerprint” so they cannot register again.

3) Keep them off your site. If the “bad actor” tries to register again, they will have to go through the Trufina Identification process a second time. If they have already registered with us, they will not be able to register a second time, but rather be asked to login to their existing account. When they use their existing Trufina ID the auction site will know that they have already registered previously. This protects both the auction site (by making sure registrants are unique) and users (by making sure the auction site only receives the information they need).

Other benefits of having your buyer and sellers get their identity verified by Trufina include:
- Adding a Trufina ID URL (which links to a Trufina verified public profile) to their auction profile. This allows members to ask for more detailed information from the owner of the identity information.
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- Getting a criminal background check from Trufina. Share the results of the criminal background check with other members to create a trusted relationship.

Robert King, UpperBid CEO speaks out about Trufina “There was a huge problem with fraud before, but that has been almost eliminated with the addition of the Trufina verification process “.

Please share your thoughts and comments, we’d love to hear from you.