* Liberty Alliance yet to deliver full guidelines
The Liberty Alliance seems to get almost as much criticism as praise these days. For example, last week, when the group released guidelines for Web services (we’ll get to those in a moment), Business Week columnist Stephen H. Wildstrom (link below) wrote that the “Liberty Alliance Project, now has the backing of more than 150 companies and organizations. But as you might expect, an enterprise answerable to that many masters tends to be ponderous, and actual deployments of the Liberty technology have been very slow in coming.” This is something I’ve mentioned from time to time. We were supposed to have had an announcement of a major, consumer-oriented Circle of Trust by the end of 2004. I’m still waiting.
A Circle of Trust, for those new to this conversation, is defined by the alliance as “a group of service providers that share linked identities and have pertinent business agreements in place regarding how to do business and interact with identities. Once a user has been authenticated by a Circle of Trust identity provider, that individual can be easily recognized and take part in targeted services from other service providers within that Circle of Trust. It should be noted that this concept of trust-based relationships between organizations and their individual or joint customers has existed in the offline business world for years; two common examples would include travel alliances and affiliate business partnerships.”
There are a few enterprise circles of trust (federating different organizations within the enterprise) and a couple of “value chain” circles of trust (federating suppliers and customers) but few practical examples of a consumer version (federating consumers and retailers) – which is, supposedly, what brought the alliance together in the first place.
In fact, though, the group just last week got around to releasing guidelines called “Circles of Trust: The Implications of EU Data Protection and Privacy Law for Establishing a Legal Framework for Identity Federation” (https://www.projectliberty.org/press/details.php?item_id=107) with the requirements necessary to implement the Liberty Alliance specifications within the countries of the European Union.
Also released last week by the alliance were new specifications that support Web services for presence (are you logged in or not, online or not, available or not), contact book (extended address book) and geo-location (where, exactly, are you?). These services are very important to the mobile communications industry and less important to the consumer market and the value chain market mentioned earlier.
These two announcements lead me to believe that the identity federation and single sign-on services partnership formed last year between IBM and European mobile communications provider France Telecom is starting to bear some fruit. That really is a good sign, and shows (hopefully) that the Liberty Alliance isn’t bogging down in endless debates like many standards bodies. But it sure would be nice to finally see a real, live, working Circle of Trust that benefits consumers.
