Bryan Helmkamp

OpenID has been hot lately, and the largest news has been that AOL has become an identity provider. This means if you use AOL (or AIM), you already have an OpenID that you can use to login at any OpenID consumer-enabled websites.

It’s easy to see why AOL would be interested in doing this. Now, instead of just being able to track your activities on their own web properties, AOL will also know what other sites you are using and when. (The OpenID authentication process requires sending information about the consumer site to the provider.) And this is valuable information to a seasoned web marketing machine.

So the big guys are interested in providing our identity, but what’s been disturbing me lately is a distinct lack of news that the big guys are working to become OpenID consumers. While acting as an OpenID consumer is not required for identity providers, I believe it’s the right thing to do for users. Let them BYOI (Bring Your Own Identity).

If the Big Four aren’t interested in being involved in a truly open identification system, it’s not too difficult to imagine a future where AOL will encourage their customers to use their AOL OpenID to login everywhere except at AOL’s own web properties, where we’ll have to login with a screenname and password.

We’d be forced to maintain a separate identity with each of the Big Four, and, with the increased privacy considerations, we might be worse off then when we started.