The De Lille thing and OpenID providers

I’ve been under a rock the past 3 to 4 weeks. Only 2 nights ago, Justin told me what the whole whoohaa is about.

Today I read this article by My Broadband (found through Afrigator ) and I was wondering (since I know sweet blow-all about legal issues - Paul, help please!).

What got me thinking was this:

“When Internet users subscribe to services that allow them to operate their own blogs or take part in anonymous discussion forums or chat rooms,they first have to register with the blog or chat room operator.

These registrations require the submission of the user’s true identity and contact details. Although the user may provide fraudulent details, his or her email address is generally authenticated by sending the username and password necessary to activate the blog or discussion forum to the email address provided.

The true identities of these users are generally governed by the operator’s terms and conditions, which prevent the operator from disclosing it unless authorised thereto by due legal process.”

But what about services using OpenID? Where all you store is the user’s OpenID and nothing else. So if you do get hammerred to reveal the user’s “true identity” all you can do is pass the buck to the OpenID provider, is that correct? I feel sorry for the oke being defamed, since he’ll go on a wild goose chase of note here! (Okay, this is not yet an issue since not many services
has adopted the use of OpenID, so its not really all that relevant… YET.)

As Vincent said:

“It is easy to track you, there is a permanent record of what you said
that you might not have any control over anymore because you were
showing your muscle on someone else’s blog and its simply in bad taste.”

Caught you will get caught, so watch you tongue…

technorati tags:openid, patriciadelille

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2 Comments to "The De Lille thing and OpenID providers"

• Paul Jacobson said: On 05/30/2007 at 9:32 am

  Hey Stii

  I’ve got a better one for you. What about someone who accesses the Web through an anonymous proxy (or whatever the term is) and whose identity can’t be tracked back? I imagine that even with an OpenID account a person who is defamed could secure a warrant or court order to force the OpenID provider to disclose the details of the offender. The Web does present a challenge but the law is pretty much the same here. What changes are the technical challenges that must be overcome to identify the culprit.

• Oscar Reitsma said: On 05/30/2007 at 3:09 pm

  Aahh, anonymity… the not so holy grail.

  There’s things like “The Onion Router” (Tor) network. Thats one way (Although there are rumours of govt servers on these networks). As for having an e-mail address what about services like:
  http://www.mytrashmail.com/
  http://www.mailexpire.com/

  At this point as far as I know, there is no Iron Clad way of ensuring authenticity of a user. As for Vincents comment: I wouldn’t say its easy… but there are ways and means of tracking people and connections, although definitely not foolproof.

  For a single user to put up a single post/comment, I believe its quite easy not to get caught! And if its possible for 1 post, its possible for 2 etc. It all depends how much time and effort you put in, and how skilled you are at manipulating these things!

Spit it out!

Filed in: Blogging, Semantic Web by: Stii