Identity and Access Management

I stumbled upon the User-centric Identity Discussion today and thought I would provide my thought on the same. As part of that article/post I ran in to the comment "It's my identity. It is not one conferred upon me by an organization outside myself. It is not a representation of me in a context other than my autonomous and independent self, operating in the larger world we call the marketplace. This is the identity we hope to more fully empower by our various projects." I am a bit confused about this one. I have never understood the concept of MY Identity. I understand what this is proposing but the way I see the identity, it is something beyond I, Me, Myself. As I have said earlier , that the identity can not exist in absence of relationship and so far I have not seen anything in these discussion that would change it. So, the idea of My identity, the way I see it, is just the way I have built an identity about myself based on the relationship I have with me. So, if

This entry was written based on my existing unhappiness with user-centric identity definitions and some thoughts on the "user-centric identity" discussion that I read at [Eve Maler - Sun: R-E-S-P-E-C-T] , Paul Madsen: A protocol for the people and Pete Rowley - People in the protocol As I have said earlier , the user centric identity infrastructure must have three components i.e. User having some level of control what they need to disclose to existing or new acknowledging entity [User-Ack] User have some level of control on what information acknowledging entity can receive about them from 3rd entities. [3rd-Ack] User have some level of control on what information acknowledging entity can give to 3rd entities [Ack-3rd] User have some level of control on what 3rd entities do with the information that they recieve from acknowledging entities and other 3rd entities. [3rd-3rd] Intent and Share Event Now the control of the identity data can be done at intent or share

I ran into this entry on Identity - Management and trust [Discovering Identity - Mark Dixon] which took me on the following thought sequence. Please note this rambling is more of a tomato/TomATo discussion so if you have some thing better to do skip this one. Identity and Relationship Identity, the way I see it, is about perceptions that a acknowledging entity has of the identity entity . First of all, an identity can not exist without a relationship. This relationship can be between you and any other entity (which can be person, group, corporation, etc.) or even yourself. But this raises a question well did you not miss the entity itself. Shouldn't there be an identity of entity itself which exist all by itself? Yes, the existence of the entity itself is necessary either in past (a star that has turned in to a black hole), present or in future (various elements in periodic tables that were identified but not discovered until later) but it not sufficient for the identity. Unles