Digital ID Coach

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tools contact management, Facebook, Flickr, identity management, login, online identity, openID, passwords, Rob Farrow, Twitter

Tools: Verisign Labs Personal Identity Portal (PIP)

November 26th, 2008

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Verisign Labs offers a beta version of Personal Identity Portal (PIP) to “manage your online identity without compromising your privacy.” Verisign, the mother ship, offers SSL certificates to make sure web sites have appropriate trust credentials. With PIP, Verisign is also boosting their “trust” model: use your PIP identity to access web sites, protect your identity, and share your profile data.

Using PIP

First, create an account with PIP. As with other identity providers, your user name becomes part of your OpenID. This account is like others: you’ll need a user name and password.

PIP offers a Firefox plugin that makes signing in to certain sites easy. Verisign says the “sites include Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many major retailers.” (Amusingly, they call it an OpenID Seatbelt. Huh? Keeping me safe in my chair?) The plugin remembers your user name, but you’ll need to provide the password when you use it.

PIP lets you create your own identity page(s). When you’re done, PIP allows you to see your OpenID page with a carousel of your various sites:

In the Help and Support area, there’s a video on setting up your personal identity page. (These guys didn’t make it easy to find more information about their service. They have an FAQ and more videos about how one click (a password manager) works in the Help and Support area.)

Once you’ve set up your various services, you have a nice carousel that people can flip through and click on to visit that site.

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tools identity management, login, online identity, openID, passwords, security, SSL, Verisign Labs

Tools: Vidoop and MyVidoop

November 26th, 2008

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Vidoop offers myVidoop to help people manage their passwords and fill in online forms. Filling in forms is a form of identity management. For instance, are you filling in a form to purchase something online? or to log into your work computer? The information needed for each transaction might be different (for example, addresses).

Vidoop also offers password and identity management solutions for businesses. Those tools will be covered in a future post.

Using MyVidoop

First, create an account with MyVidoop. Your user name becomes part of your OpenID, which you can use to easily create accounts and log into other services that recognize OpenIDs (such as this site, many blogs, perhaps soon: AOL, Yahoo, Google (who interestingly offer OpenIDs but don’t recognize other services!), and more.

Vidoop has an original way of dealing with passwords. They use an image grid, called an Image Shield, that contains pictures in certain categories, which you pick out when you set up your account. Once you give Vidoop your user name, it generates a grid like this.

You identify the pictures that correspond to your categories. In this grid, we might have picked the categories of cars, cats, and dogs. There are examples of those three along the bottom row. In the box below your image grid, you enter the letters corresponding to those categories: BDJ. Vidoop has a demo on their Image Shield.

Note: I set this up for an older friend of mine who was not very familiar with the Internet. He keeps wanting to click on the pictures, which often lead him to an advertisement or related website. For example, if he clicked on the car, it would take him to a car website. Not so good for him. He got pretty frustrated with this and wanted to change all of his logins and passwords to the same thing. (Not possible for a number of reasons.) He is learning that using myVidoop is easier than the alternative.

Once you’ve gotten access to your account, you can store information on various online accounts and various identities (for example: 1) your work address and phone, 2) your home financial information, and 3) your leisure or gaming identity). In fact you can store and access passwords for lots of sites, including sites that don’t yet recognize OpenID. This is a feature worth checking out, as it allows you to access all of your passwords from any computer (though Vidoop will check to make sure new browsers are ok, and will log the access).

Here are videos to give you more information about using Vidoop and getting started.

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tools identity management, images, login, myVidoop, openID, passwords, Vidoop

Tools for managing your online world

November 26th, 2008

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Several interesting tools are available to help individuals and businesses manage their passwords and identities. The next few posts will offer a quick introduction and overview of the tools to help individuals manage their online world. I’ll cover more tools, and business tools, in future posts.

Each tool has different characteristics, and each offers an OpenID that will assist you in password/account/identity management. The idea behind OpenID is that you can use one account to represent you in multiple online situations–like using your openID to log into other accounts, instead of remembering user names and passwords for each of them.

The first group of sites I’ll be looking at are:

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