Comments on: OpenID getting more usable, a tiny bit at a time

JanRain's OpenID Selector makes OpenID just a bit more approachable.

[vidoop]

Hi Rafe,

Excellent post, I work for Vidoop (http://myVidoop.com) and we are definitely excited to see the usability of OpenID improving. This ID selector is a great step towards making the technology easy for everyone to use. I think with the usability and security advances (e.g. our ImageShield, Verisign tokens, etc.) we have seen, adoption of OpenID by financial and health institutions is not too far away..

-KFox

[provis10]

Aren't there some incredible data aggregation possibilities created by this method of session initiation? Think DoubleClick, on identity steroids. The operator of a service like this can collect data about not only which websites you use: they also know your preferred identity for each site, which identities you group together, generally who you are, etc.

The commercial "applications" are obvious, as are the implications for privacy and phishing.

[bryantcutler]

A core concept of OpenID is that you trust your Identity Provider at a very fundamental level. They *do* see your authentication transactions, and thus have access to some part of your attention data, but you're already trusting them with your *password* (or key, or cert, or whatever). If you can't trust any of the big providers enough to share those secrets, you can always just run your own OpenID server - there's nothing ClaimID or myOpenID is doing that you can't do yourself, with the JanRain libraries and a functioning server.

[michaelo1966]

We're struggling w/ this too. My company, http://www.zvisitor.com, is for both physical and digital security. A consolidated sign-in -- in both the web and IRL -- would be really helpful.