Mark’s raised the idea that credit bureaus could act as Identity Providers under the concept of User-centric Identity (I’m still catching up on the reading!). My only comment to this is:

I bloody well hope they don’t.

A very quick search using your favourite search engine throws up reams of examples where such credit bureaus hold incorrect information about consumers, often to the point of holding outright lies, and not providing a mechanism whereby consumers can correct - or in many cases even check - the information held about them.

Even a recent piece in the Consumerist illustrates problems with credit bureaus and the information they hold about people, and the lack of care taken in cleaning the data and informing associated agencies of the change.

The major problem with credit bureaus being providers of identity information is that there is no benefit to them in expending the time and effort in either checking that the information held about someone is correct, or in implementing procedures to allow consumers to check and correct such information. The first is time consuming and costly, and the second is time consuming, costly and will require the implementation of identity checks, which makes it even more time consuming and costly.

Technorati Tags: Identity Management, Digital Identity