InfoCard not son of Passport, says Microsoft executive

IDG News Service - REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Hoping to learn from the lessons of its unsuccessful Passport initiative, Microsoft Corp. is taking a more open tack in developing its new InfoCard identity management platform, a company executive said Tuesday.
Like Passport, InfoCard is designed to make it easier for users to surf the Web by keeping track of their usernames and passwords as they move from site to site. Unlike Passport, however, InfoCard is being designed to work on client and server software that was not developed by Microsoft.
Since the beta version of InfoCard was released in May, Microsoft has been working with developers of the Firefox and Opera browsers, as well as organizations like the Apache Software Foundation and Apple Computer Inc., said Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief architect of identity and access, speaking at the DataCenter Ventures 2005 conference.
"These aren't your typical Microsoft customers," he said. "The main thing is, we need a solution that works on Linux boxes as much as it works on Microsoft boxes."
Though the Passport identity management system now processes about 1 billion authentication requests per day, making it too popular to rightly be called a failure, the service has never gained popularity outside of Microsoft's own Web properties, Cameron said.
"When it comes to identity, people want to understand why the parties to any interaction are there," he said. "It makes sense for people to use Passport, run by Microsoft ... to access Microsoft properties. It didn't make sense for users to use Passport to access eBay."
Likewise, Europeans were uncomfortable with the fact that Passport data was stored on servers in Redmond, Wash., Cameron said.
InfoCard seeks to get around this problem by operating in what Cameron calls a "polycentric" and "polymorphic" fashion, meaning that the software will run on different operating systems, and the data will be stored in places that make sense to the user.
After its release, Passport was blasted by privacy advocates, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which argued that Microsoft was not taking adequate steps to protect users and give them control of their data.
At the time, Microsoft disputed those concerns, but the company now needs to welcome them, Cameron said.
"We need to invite the people who used to be called privacy extremists into our hearts because they have a lot of wisdom," Cameron said. "This [is] not the son of Passport."
Microsoft's goal is to make it easier to create "identity-aware software" while at the same time respecting the users' privacy concerns, he said.