Identity Assurance Costs

Full Title

The cost of providing assurance of a person's identity online is growing as more people are demanding more control.

Context

• Over the years attacks against user's online identifiers has become the industry known as Identity Theft.
• Increasing awareness of the need for privacy online has lead to mandates for all holders of user private information to be more careful of what the user now considers to be high value information about themselves.
• Nothing that has been accomplished to date has improved the perception or the reality of a user's sense of privacy.

Problems

• Privacy was first consider a legal right in a law journal article titled “The Right to Privacy” by Warren and Brandeis 1890 defined the right to be let alone.
• Legislation in the past dozen years has lead to an explosion of court cases based primarily on compensating victims for breaches to those laws.
• Now most "privacy experts" are lawyers and most emphasis has been on adjudicating or avoiding tort actions.
• So now costs rise but results are minimal.